Three years after his failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, California's once and future governor addressed the International Transpersonal Association Conference. I have no idea what that is, but the group's name—and his ruminations on the nation's political system—were just so Jerry Brown.
After a joke about the small crowds in New Hampshire, Brown said that "We are in a degenerate state of self-government." He said he didn't want to depress the audience. But "as much as I dislike politics," he noted, "I have devoted my life to it—out of some form of enlightened masochism—or some other deep motive that I have not yet been able to plumb. But I am not sick of it, and I am not cynical about it—but I'm not naive about it."
As Brown heads into the sunset (or at least to his Colusa County ranch), many political writers in California are trying to assess his recent legacy. It's not hard to tally up some of his wins and losses, think about his good policies and bad ones and analyze the latter Brown years as one would analyze the legacy of any politician. But it's much harder to assess Brown using the title of that speech: "Political Consciousness and Transformative Action." Did Brown manage to transform the way politics is done in California?
It's an interesting question because Brown is likely to be remembered as the last adult in Sacramento—the guy who made sure the books were in balance. Some of his parting words echo that theme. In a December 11 exit interview with National Public Radio, Brown touted a $14 billion budget surplus. "Now, what did I do or didn't do?" he asked. "I did rein in spending. I did—and then that took fortitude against the tendency of the Democratic Party to spend on almost anything that somebody comes up with that, you know, that satisfies all of the key constituencies."
That's the kind of accomplishment that any Republican might tout, albeit Brown achieved it with multiple, unnecessary tax increases—and he signed budgets that set records for spending. But there's little doubt that Brown owned the Legislature these past eight years. He got his way on everything from budget negotiations to some of his more controversial priorities (such as a $100 billion bullet train and his climate-change activism).
A little fiscal responsibility isn't really transformative. Balancing the books and building up a rainy day fund is arguably the fundamental job of the governor. Doing so as the member of a party that typically had supermajorities in the Legislature and controlled every statewide constitutional office shouldn't be that big of a deal. But his efforts often worked against his own party which, as he added, "only know[s] how to say 'yes,' even to harebrained schemes."
Two of his most significant accomplishments often are overlooked. In 2011, the federal courts had ordered California to reduce its prison overcrowding from 180 percent to 137.5 percent of design capacity within two years. Republicans still complain about the resulting policies, namely the "realignment" law that sent many nonviolent state prisoners to county jails and voter initiatives that reduced sentences for some offenders. But Brown was at his best there.
He at one point vowed to defy the federal orders for further reductions, but he wasn't about to let 10,000 felons loose on the streets two years after he had already passed that realignment plan. Ultimately, Brown won an extension from the courts and the prison population fell after voters approved a couple of criminal-justice initiatives.
The other significant, but overlooked, policy involved his 2011 dissolution of the state's notoriously ham-fisted redevelopment agencies, which subsidized private development and routinely abused eminent domain. Brown dissolved the agencies because he desperately needed cash during a budget crisis. But it was a big deal whatever his motivations.
Ironically, as his administration reaches its end, Brown has taken on some of the more potentially transformative issues. His attorneys have taken an admirable stance before the state Supreme Court arguing for changes in the "California Rule," which makes it virtually impossible for localities to rein in pension debt. Cities are being crushed by overly generous pension promises, and unless that rule is changed they could face a future of diminished services, higher taxes, and even bankruptcy.
Brown also has been setting records for issuing pardons and commutations. He complained about the "atmosphere, the gangs, the hopelessness, sentences that are so long…the no-exit attitude has made it virtually impossible to have any strong rehabilitative atmosphere." His last-minute commutations are a haphazard way to deal with an issue that should have been a feature early in his administration.
But did he transform politics? Of course not. Then again, politics is the wrong place to seek transformation.
This column was first published in the Orange County Register.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. He was a Register editorial writer from 1998-2009. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
The post The Last Adult in Sacramento appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When President Donald Trump bragged in his first State of the Union address about cutting red tape, the Democratic response was no surprise. "Deregulation," warned Center for American Progress Senior Advisor Sam Berger in Fortune, "is simply a code word for letting big businesses cut corners at everyone else's expense."
But many leading Democrats had the opposite view in the 1970s. Then, at the dawn of the deregulation era, left-leaning politicians and economists understood that excessive government management of industry let the big-business incumbents get away with lousy performance at the expense of competitors, taxpayers, and consumers. The leading figure in that fight to cut red tape and shut down entire federal agencies was none other than Jimmy Carter.
It was Sen. Ted Kennedy who held extensive Senate hearings in the early '70s, with testimony from the likes of Ralph Nader and liberal economist Alfred Kahn, about the benefits of lifting state controls on the airline industry. The resulting Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, signed by Carter, killed the Civil Aeronautics Board—a federal agency that decided which airlines could fly where, and even what they could charge. The new competition to the old airline cartel reduced fares, expanded destinations, increased safety, and made air travel an option for those of us who aren't rich.
Carter also lifted stifling government oversight of the rail and trucking industries under a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. The result? Competition intensified, prices dropped, and consumers saved more money on everyday products.
In 1978, President Carter signed a bill that lifted Prohibition-era criminal restrictions on home brewing. The legalization of do-it-yourself beer production unleashed a boom of experimentation, paving the way for the craft beer revolution that is ongoing to this day. The year that Carter loosened the rules, the U.S. was home to a mere 50 breweries. Today there are well over 5,000. In two generations of beermaking, America went from global laughingstock to world leader.
The governor of California during Carter's presidency was none other than Jerry Brown, then known as "Governor Moonbeam" for his far-out musings, glittery social life, and lefty politics. Yet Brown, too, could be a fiery skeptic of government. In his terrific second inaugural address in 1979, Brown stated that "many regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices."
But even while some sectors were unleashed four decades ago by far-seeing Democrats and Republicans alike, too many governments at the local, state, and federal levels have forgotten those lessons, and instead imposed entirely new categories of regulations. Occupational licensing, which applied to about one in 10 jobs 40 years ago, now impacts one in three. Arizona will put its citizens in jail for six months for operating a blow dryer without a license. Texas wants to make it a criminal offense to buy unauthorized pecans. And Washington, D.C., wants to require that all daycare providers have a college degree.
The aggregate cost of these regulations is staggering. Last year, according to the pro-free markets Competitive Enterprise Institute, federal regulations cost Americans $1.9 trillion—or around $15,00 per household. And while President Trump has cut the number of pages in the Federal Register by about one-third since he took office, there are still some 67 federal departments, agencies, and commissions currently working on more than 3,000 new regulations. It seems you can't stop the regulatory state, you can only hope to contain it.
As Alfred Kahn and his liberal contemporaries could have explained, licensing boards and other regulatory bodies tend to be dominated by industry incumbents who are mainly interested in protecting their own turf. Regulation is the friend, not enemy, of big business.
So how did the party of Jimmy Carter and sideburns-era Jerry Brown become the ideological home of Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? One explanation may be that Democratic support for deregulation back then was born out of a sense of nearly hopeless desperation in the face of stagflation. Cutting red tape to foster dynamism was about the last move politicians had left.
Our long economic expansion and stock-market boom will soon come to an end, imposing limits on government precisely at the moment when it's asked to do more. When that day of reckoning comes, the best questions for lawmakers of both parties to ask may just be: What would Jimmy Carter do?
Written by Matt Welch. Produced and edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Todd Krainin.
Photo credits: Jimmy Carter Library, Arthur Grace/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Dennis Brack/Newscom, Everett Collection/Newscom, Ron Sachs/CNP/MEGA/Newscom, Brian F. Alpert/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Paul Harris/Pacific Coast Nes/Newscom, Bee Staff Photo/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Dennis Brack/bb51/Newscom, Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS/Newscom, Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom
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The post When Democrats Loved Deregulation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If San Francisco attempts to move forward with establishing supervised injection facilities (SIFs), places where those addicted to drugs can safely shoot up, it will have to do so without the state government's blessing. In early October, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed A.B. 186, a bill that would have authorized the city and county to create such facilities.
The sites, found in urban areas around the world but not yet in the United States, allow users to get high under the supervision of people who could help them in the event of an overdose. They also generally offer treatment options and access to social workers. In short, SIFs prioritize harm reduction over deterrence, and a 2014 report looking at 75 different studies found that the sites are successful in reducing the frequency of overdoses without leading to increases in drug use or crime.
San Francisco has an intravenous drug problem of epic proportions. Citizens have been posting videos on social media of users injecting drugs openly in transit stations; according to BuzzFeed, annual complaints about needles and medical waste on public streets jumped from 290 to more than 6,000 over the course of a decade. Civic leaders there had planned to open two SIFs in July, with private funders willing to foot the cost, but concerns remained that the sites' workers—many of them health-care professionals—could be arrested for violating California laws that prohibit knowingly providing a room or building for the storage or use of drugs. Brown's veto makes such prosecutions more likely.
The ostensible reason for rejecting the bill is that California can't protect such a facility from the federal government. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently warned in a New York Times op-ed that the U.S. Department of Justice would sabotage any attempt to open a SIF anywhere in the country. In his veto letter, Brown said it would be "irresponsible" for him to expose local officials and health-care providers to potential federal prosecution.
That's a smokescreen, however. Brown's embrace of science in areas like climate change and renewable energy does not extend to the research on drug use. "Residential, outpatient and case management—all are needed, voluntarily undertaken or coercively imposed by our courts," he wrote. "Enabling illegal and destructive drug use will never work. The community must have the authority and the laws to require compassionate but effective and mandatory treatment. AB 186 is all carrot and no stick."
America's decadeslong drug war shows that the stick does not work, and—barring the kind of brutal state-sanctioned violence committed against drug offenders in Southeast Asia—it never will. Besides, the point of SIFs is to make drug use less deadly, not less prevalent. The sites save lives by preventing overdoses and save money by reducing the costly emergency services that are part and parcel of enforcement and treatment.
The post The Lives We Can Save in California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, isn't exactly known as a staunch defender of the rights of Golden State voters to legally keep and bear arms.
But once fellow Democrat Gavin Newsom—who won the governor's race last night against Republican John Cox—takes office, defenders of the Second Amendment may come to miss the state's outgoing chief executive.
Brown signed many anti-gun bills into law. But he vetoed many as well. A list prepared by the Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) shows that, since taking office in 2011 for his second stint as governor, Brown vetoed no fewer than 26 anti-gun proposals.
"I'm going to miss Jerry Brown because it's going to be much, much worse going forward," says Brandon Combs, president of the FPC.
Brown vetoed a 2013 bill, SB 374, that would have dramatically expanded the definition of "assault weapon." He vetoed, twice, legislation to restrict gun shows at San Francisco's Cow Palace exhibition hall. Brown vetoed a bill, AB 2333, that would have cracked down on children's BB guns. He vetoed a bill, AB 180, that would have carved out an exception to state preemption law and allowed the city of Oakland to enact stricter anti-gun measures. And he signed AB 2151, backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), which encourages youth to hunt big game.
When rejecting a proposal that would have required firearm owners to obtain serial numbers from the government, Brown's veto message said: "I appreciate the author's concerns about gun violence, but I can't see how adding a serial number to a homemade gun would significantly advance public safety."
In 2014, Brown's opposition to mandatory background checks imposed on California residents who want to buy ammunition helped to sink that bill, SB 53, in the legislature.
Newsom responded by crafting Proposition 63, which used the state's ballot initiative process to accomplish much the same thing without the approval of the legislature or governor. In addition, Proposition 63 included a mass confiscation of standard capacity firearm magazines, including ones that had been legally owned for decades, which are able to hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time that his revulsion toward firearms dates back to 1973, when his grandfather killed himself with one.
"My grandfather committed suicide, but not before putting his daughter—my mother—and her twin against the fireplace and saying he was going to blow their brains out," Newsom told the newspaper. "That's how I grew up. That's how I found out about guns."
"I can't stand 'em."
In 2016, Proposition 63 was approved by California voters by a margin of 63 to 37 percent.
Newsom has "been vocally anti-gun every chance he gets," says Combs. "He doesn't shy away from saying that he's welcoming new gun control, way beyond what we have today in California." (The NRA has given Newsom an F rating.)
Combs believes that position, coupled with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' permissive attitude toward Second Amendment violations, will usher in a wave of new anti-gun laws: Unless federal courts intervene, Californians may end up with the right to own merely one handgun, in their homes, locked up, and nothing else.
"Anything beyond that, not only can they ban prospectively, but they can ban retroactively" as well, Combs says.
During his campaign for governor, Newsom has used gun owners and the NRA as a political foil. He's accused President Trump of being "bought and paid for by the NRA," has said that "the NRA's reign over our country and our laws must end." He has called for "comprehensive gun control" and even posted a video to Twitter claiming that "it's faster to buy an assault rifle than a cup of coffee." (California law already requires that all firearm purchases take place through a licensed dealer, with federal and state government background checks performed, and a mandatory 10-day waiting period imposed.)
By contrast, Brown hails from a different era of California that allowed him to rise above partisan politics, says Gene Hoffman, chairman of the Calguns Foundation, which frequently files lawsuits to protect Californians' rights to keep and bear arms.
"Gavin is of the era where, after the utter defeat of any Republican influence, all politics is California is about who is further left," he says. "And there are few things modern leftists like more than disarming citizens."
The post New California Gov. Gavin Newsom Has Been 'Vocally Anti-Gun Every Chance He Gets' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If San Francisco attempts to move forward with supervised injection facilities, where people addicted to drugs can safely shoot up, it will have to do so without the state government's blessing.
Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill from lawmakers that would authorize the city and county of San Francisco to create supervised injection facilities (SIFs). These sites, found in cities around the world, but not yet in the United States, give drug users a place to get high under the supervision of people who can assist in the event of an overdose, and can also help users access resources to help them transition to maintenance therapy or quit drugs altogether. Injection centers prioritize harm reduction over treatment and punishment, and studies show they save lives and money.
Which is why it's so unfortunate that Brown vetoed a bill to authorize San Francisco's SIF plan. The city has a massive problem with public drug use, and used needles and other drug waste are common in public spaces. City leaders had planned to open SIFs this month, but it hasn't happened. This bill, A.B. 186, was supposed to help the San Francisco get started by guaranteeing that people operating the facilities wouldn't be arrested by police.
To be clear, the bill did not authorize any tax dollars to be spent on these injection facilities. The plan has always been for the sites to be funded and operated by private non-profits. Californians were not being asked to subsidize drug use. This bill simply authorized San Francisco and its concerned citizens to move forward without threat of arrest. The plan has the support of San Francisco's civic leadership and mayor.
Nevertheless, Brown vetoed the bill. Part of the issue, he noted, was that California lacks the ability to protect the facility from the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency. It's not just state law these facilities would run afoul of: the feds can come barging in and arrest everybody, something the U.S. Attorney of Vermont has threatened against Burlington leaders. California had a similar problem when it first legalized medical marijuana in the 1990s, and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently warned flat-out in a New York Times op-ed piece that the DOJ would absolutely act against any attempt to open such a facility.
Brown makes note of Rosenstein's threats in his veto letter and says that it would be "irresponsible" for him to expose local officials and health-care providers to potential federal prosecution. That's understandable, though it's not like anybody is going to be forced to assume the risk. This bill would've simply provided protection from state and local law enforcement, and made no claims of immunity from the DEA or DOJ.
Besides, that's not the real reason Brown is rejecting the bill. He may see himself as a man of facts and science when it comes to climate change and environmentally friendly policies, but he's an anti-science blockhead when it comes to drugs.
Ultimately, what Brown really, truly wants here is to be able to force people to get drug treatment. It's plain as day in his veto letter: "Residential, outpatient and case management—all are needed, voluntarily undertaken or coercively imposed by our courts," he writes in his veto letter. "[E]nabling illegal and destructive drug use will never work. The community must have the authority and the laws to require compassionate but effective and mandatory treatment. AB 186 is all carrot and no stick."
Our decades-long drug war shows that the stick does not work; never has and—barring the kind of state-sanctioned violence against drug offenders in Southeast Asia—never will. Besides, the point of SIFs is not to make drug use less prevalent, but less deadly. These facilities save lives by preventing overdoses, and money by reducing the costs of emergency services required for enforcement and treatment. There are studies that back this up (a study that questioned the value of safe injection facilities was recently retracted due to flaws in the methodology).
Brown's belief that punishment and coercion are the best strategies for reducing drug use is simply not true. It's like saying we could end reckless driving by getting rid of seatbelts. But the point of seatbelts, like SIFs, is exactly the opposite of that. They are intended to take the sharp edge off unhealthy choices, and the alternative is more deaths.
The post Gov. Jerry Brown's Addiction to the Nanny State Kills Off Safe Injection Site Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For decades, California has kept police misconduct records exempt from public records requests, denying citizens (and even prosecutors and defense attorneys in court cases) easy access to information about law enforcement behavior.
Now that secrecy is coming to an end. This afternoon Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law S.B. 1421, sponsored by state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D–Berkeley). S.B. 1421 changes the rules to call for the release of police conduct (and misconduct) records in certain situations: if the officer discharged his or her gun in an incident; if the officer was involved in an incident that led to death or great bodily injury; if the officer had been found to have engaged in sexual assault with a member of the public (this includes any sexual act while on duty); and if the officer had been found to have engaged in dishonest practices, such as committing perjury, falsifying reports, or destroying or concealing evidence.
Today was the last day for Brown to sign or veto bills passed during the 2018 legislative season. He had been keeping mum about whether he'd sign on to this reform. He was responsible for signing the original bill back in 1978 that exempted police conduct reports from public view. What spooled out from that initial bill was an environment where citizens simply were not able to find out if an officer involved in a violent or otherwise controversial confrontation had a history of disciplinary problems. Even prosecutors and defense attorneys had to beg judges for information from the conduct records of officers put on the stand as witnesses.
This legislation represents a huge shift in the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the public in California. Police unions have fought for years to keep officers' bad conduct out of the public eye. They've been succeeding for a long time. This change will bolster pushes for transparency in other states (such as New York) that similarly conceal bad cop behavior from the public.
But there's more! Brown also signed A.B. 748, which will establish that police body camera footage is a public record under state law. As body cameras began to be implemented across the state, there wasn't an official state policy determining to what extent the public would be allowed to see the footage. So law enforcement agencies were making their own rules, and as you might expect, they typically decided to conceal what they had.
A.B. 748 will allow police to withhold body camera footage for 45 days if there's an ongoing investigation, and it puts a process into place to keep footage sealed longer if there is a good reason. It also puts guidelines into place to redact or edit footage that could violate the privacy of witnesses or victims. But the assumption now is going to be that all police body camera footage will eventually become public records.
Peter Bibring, director of police practices for the ACLU of California, shot out a celebratory statement this evening:
Together, SB 1421 and AB 748 will shine a much-needed light on police violence and abuse. Specifically, SB 1421 restores the public's right to know how departments investigate and hold accountable those officers who abuse their power to frame, sexually assault, or kill members of the public. AB 748 will ensure law enforcement agencies throughout the state release police recordings of serious uses of force, including body camera footage, which are valuable tools for civilian oversight at a time of growing concern with police violence.
The post Californians Will Finally Get Access to Records About Police Misconduct appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We're still waiting to see if California Gov. Jerry Brown has the courage to sign legislation requiring greater transparency about police misconduct. But he's clearly happy to meddle in what and how Californians drink. Yesterday he signed legislation that adds tiresome new rules about the straws used in restaurants and the drinks offered in kids' meals.
AB 1889 doesn't go so far as to ban straws entirely, but it does forbid full-service restaurants from giving customers plastic straws unless the customers ask for them. Violators face fines of up to $25 a day, up to a maximum of $300 annually. So it's essentially a tax on giving out plastic straws, should a restaurant decide to ignore the law.
That the law is so mild and inconsequential is a testament to how much the posturing around plastic straws is a symbolic gesture rather than anything that actually helps the environment. Brown rarely puts out statements when he signs bills, but he specifically did for AB 1889, noting that plastics are killing ocean life.
Reason's Christian Britschgi has been documenting the absurd, unscientific foundations of the push to ban straws. Faulty statistics and a poor grasp of where most of our ocean pollution comes from (not the United States, and certainly not from straws) have led to inane bills like this. We should be glad it isn't harsher. But the law also permits California cities to implement stricter regulations, and we've already been seeing that happen as well.
The tiresome top-down food controls don't stop there. Brown also signed SB 1192, which requires restaurants that offer children's meals to offer water or unflavored milk as the "default" drink rather than soda or juice. It further requires them to display water or milk as the drink in images and in menus. At least it doesn't forbid restaurants from providing other choices if they're asked.
We have no reason to believe that this law will stop kids and their parents from ordering sodas instead if that's what they want. Indeed, Brown embraced this paternalism the same week a bunch of nutrition studies that supposedly justified other nudge-style controls on kids' school lunch choices were retracted as junk science.
But the important thing is that California cares about the health of children, right? Well, no. In the same round of bills, Brown vetoed SB 328, which would prohibit non-rural middle and high schools from starting classes earlier than 8:30 in the morning. There are scientific studies that show later school start times allow children to get more sleep, which results in increased academic performance.
You'd think Brown would be all over this bill to help children do better in life, right? But in his veto note, Brown says that it is "opposed by teachers and school boards," some of which "prefer" to start the school day earlier. The message is clear. It's fine for the state to inconvenience restaurants and interfere with your decisions in the name of sketchy studies about kids' health, but don't start meddling with the preferred work schedules of public employees. California in a nutshell.
The post Gov. Brown Signs Stupid Straw Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law Thursday that prevents cities and counties in the state from levying sales taxes on groceries, including soda and other sugary beverages, through 2030.
Sounds great, right? On the surface, yes, but Brown and other Democratic lawmakers in the state weren't motivated by a desire to protect citizens from excess taxation. Rather, Brown signed Assembly Bill 1838 in an effort to ensure that California localities can keep on increasing other types of taxes.
The bill, which passed with overwhelming support in both houses of California's legislature, is the result of a compromise between lawmakers and the beverage industry, which was supporting a statewide ballot measure that would have made it difficult for cities and counties to raise all local taxes. Had the ballot measure passed, local tax increases would have needed the approval of two-thirds of voters rather than just a simple majority.
In a signing statement addressed to the California State Legislature, Brown assured lawmakers he understands that soda taxes "combat the dangerous and ill effects in the diets of children," but indicated he had no choice in the matter. Just four cities in the state are currently passing soda taxes, he wrote, while indicating that the tax initiative had the potential to affect all 482 cities in California.
He also noted that the ballot measure would have restricted "the normal regulatory capacity of the state by imposing a two-thirds legislative vote on what is now solely within the competency of state agencies." Such a restriction, Brown believes, "would be an abomination."
The ballot initiative, which was formally withdrawn within minutes of Brown signing AB-138 into law, would have had a significant impact on local tax increases. According to California's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO), about half of local tax measures approved by voters since 2012 did not receive two-thirds support. Those measures have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue each year, the LAO said.
The initiative did have some support in the state legislature, particularly among several Republicans who weren't happy it was withdrawn and didn't think AB-1838 was a particularly good compromise.
"This bill tells one million people that signed this petition to make it harder to raise their taxes that their voices don't matter," said state Sen. Jeff Stone (R–Temecula), according to the Los Angeles Times.
Assemblyman Matthew Harper (R–Huntington Beach), blasted Democrats who voted in favor of AB-1838 even though they support soda taxes. "Don't cry your crocodile tears at me," Harper said.
Indeed, there were many Democrats who said publicly they didn't like AB-1838 but ultimately voted yes on the measure.
"I think this is a terrible decision that we're making," said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D–Sacramento), who still supported the bill.
"What on Earth has happened here?" said Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D–Santa Monica), who also voted yes.
State Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), couldn't bring himself to support AB-1838, but said he understood many of his colleagues felt like they had to do so. He claimed the beverage "industry is aiming basically a nuclear weapon at governing in California and saying if you don't do what we want, we're going to pull the trigger and you are not going to be able to fund basic government services."
"This is a pick-your-poison kind of situation, a Sophie's choice. What the legislature is doing is perfectly reasonable," Wiener added, according to The Sacramento Bee.
In essence, Brown and other lawmakers supported AB-1838 because they didn't want to give taxpayers a bigger say in government. The result is passage of a bill that no one seems to actually like.
The post Jerry Brown Signs Soda Tax Ban (Yay!) So That California Cities Can Tax Other Things (Boo) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over at Bloomberg View, former Reason editor Virginia Postrel cops to (indirectly) causing the current housing crisis in California.
Turns out that when she and her husband—along with millions of others—moved to Los Angeles back in the go-go 1980s, native Golden Staters responded by making it increasingly difficult for developers to build housing easily, especially in established cities. A number of state-level downturns and national recessions later, California is starved for housing stock, making it increasingly difficult for younger people to live there.
Los Angeles County grew by 1 million people in the 1960s, 445,000 in the '70s, 1.4 million in the 1980s, 656,000 in the 1990s, and just 299,000 in the 2000s. Most of the growth in the 1980s, Postrel notes, came from childless migrants, not births. Anti-growth policies in big cities had the effect of pushing people further out of established metropolitan zones, creating longer commutes. She quotes a demographer who says, "In the longer view of things, the 1980s boom was quite the exception." But restrictive housing policies cast a long shadow:
Outsiders are no longer flocking to California. For the first time in its history, a majority of the state's residents are natives. But native-born Californians tend to want to stick around—preferably not in their old bedrooms. To form their own households, millennials need places to live. The growth restrictions put in place by residents upset by newcomers like me are putting houses and apartments out of reach for all but the richest of the younger generation. If California doesn't want to turn into an expensive retirement village, it needs to make room for its children.
The smart money is on California becoming the New York of the 21st century. Once the Empire State was the center of the United States in economic and cultural terms. California overtook it in 1962 to become the most populous state in the country. But by 2050, Texas may well be bigger, with a projected population of 54.4 million to California's 50 million. Whether that happens, there's little question that California is sucking wind in all sorts of ways and the political emphysema is only going to get worse once Jerry Brown leaves Sacramento. Yes, the same Jerry Brown who the Dead Kennedys mocked in "Californa Über Alles" for ushering in a era of "Zen fascism." As Steve Greenhut writes,
For all of Gov. Moonbeam's flaws, those of us with conservative, libertarian or moderate leanings know that the state government is losing the last adult in charge. The next governor will be less willing to serve as a backstop against a Legislature that's gone far to the left.
The two leading candidates for governor are Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, each of whom seems committed to spending lots more money that the state doesn't have.
In her next column at Bloomberg View, Postrel will explore politically viable ways to add to the housing stock, which is always tricky due to the relative power held by the haves over the have-nots. California's future may depend on it.
Related: In 2017, Erica Grieder argued that California should be more like Texas.
Also Related: In 2016, Reason TV's Alexis Garcia looked at young proponents of "YIMBYism" (Yes In My Back Yard) in San Francisco, one of the planet's most expensive cities.
The post California Über Alles? Only in Counterproductive, Outdated Housing Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Australia's government plans to fight the country's tobacco black market by banning cash payments of more than $10,000 in Australian dollars—the equivalent of about $7,500 in the United States.
What this actually does is create a new black market for money exchanges while screwing over any law-abiding citizens who want to engage in large cash transactions for any number of perfectly normal reasons.
This is all about revenue, of course. Australia has the highest cigarettes taxes in the world. As in New York City—which has the highest cigarette prices in the United States, mostly due to taxes—the results are a massive black market and organized crime. More importantly, as far as the Australian government is concerned, it's not getting its money. Officials hope the ban on big cash payments will bring in an additional $3 billion a year.
This estimate assumes the smugglers and other black marketeers won't simply change the way they do their cash transactions, or turn to cybercurrencies, or, you know, just not comply with this law either. Obviously this new regulation will not prompt a lot of lawbreakers to suddenly toss aside a lucrative lifestyle. It will probably just be another criminal charge and a somewhat tougher sentence for those who get caught.
But an ineptly crafted hammer like this is going to have some significant side effects on people who are completely law-abiding. The law doesn't care if your cash transaction is to purchase something perfectly legal or not. And as Matt Novak notes at Gizmodo, more than a third of all commercial transactions in Australia are in cash.
At the Australian news site news.com.au, the owner of a Sydney-based security company that collects and moves cash worries that this new law will decimate his business:
"It's going to screw me—95 per cent of my business is cash collections," [Paul] Thomas said. "On a monthly basis, we could process and move up to $4-5 million—either picking up cash, processing and EFT-ing it to customers' accounts, or recarrying it from customers to their bank branch."
The 40-year-old said he had around 50 to 60 customers, nearly half of which were car yards. "All of my customers are legit operators, high-end car yards, money transfer depot stations," he said.
Mr. Thomas says the $10,000 limit will cause some businesses to stop accepting cash altogether, eliminating the need for armoured vans and security guards, with courier companies able to transport paperwork to banks.
Comically, the authors of Australia's new cash transaction limit respond by pointing to countries in Europe that have done the same. Among the examples are countries like Italy and Greece.
Greece and Italy have the largest shadow economies in the European Union. About a fifth of all economic activity in Greece takes place off the books. America can't even compare: Only about five percent of our estimated economy activity is not declared for taxes.
Greece and Italy are not models for fighting black markets. Greece and Italy are failing miserably. Australia should examine the countries that are trying to crack down on cash use, and recognize that this often backfires miserably.
India tried to go after its black market by rendering some of its legal tender null and void, requiring citizens to swap out their cash holdings for new money—and answer probing government questions about where the money came from. While the stated intent was to go after wealthy tax dodgers, the reality ended up hurting the poor much more. Hundreds of millions of poor Indian citizens don't have bank accounts and had their lives upturned trying to swap their suddenly worthless currency into something they could spend.
As Reason's Shikha Dalmia noted, India's prime minister was ignoring the roots of the black market problem: The country's tax rate is too high, and corrupt bureaucrats rule via bribes.
Australia's black market for tobacco is easily and obviously tied to its massive tax rate. Cigarettes cost $30 a pack there! Yet the government claims that once it cracks down and gets all those missing billions in revenue, it'll be able to lower taxes. They just need to spend an additional $318 million first to create a brand new task force to go after the black market.
That won't work. The government needs to deal with the root cause of its black market: itself. The state has forced prices of tobacco so high that people are resorting to illicit means to get their hands on the stuff. Violating the privacy of all Australian citizens—demanding that they engage in financial transactions the way you want them to—will not do anything to fix this problem.
Australia is far from the only government fighting black markets in dumb ways. When California legalized recreational marijuana, it did so with a massive tax scheme. As a result, the state's black market in marijuana isn't actually going away. Rather than realizing that his tax and licensing schemes are too onerous, Gov. Jerry Brown just proposed spending $14 million to create new task forces to fight this new variation on the marijuana black market.
Bonus link: William J. Luther explains why it's a bad idea (and a violation of citizen privacy) for governments to try to eliminate cash transactions.
The post Australia Attempts to Fight Tobacco Black Markets by Banning Large Cash Transactions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When California Gov. Jerry Brown was defending SB 1—last year's transportation funding package, which included $5.4 billion in annual gas tax and vehicle registration fee increases—he had an uncharitable term for his opponents: freeloaders.
"The freeloaders—I've had enough of them," he said at an Orange County event. "Roads require money to fix." The state was strapped for cash, he argued; drivers needed to pay up, lest the roads and highways devolve into gravel paths.
That argument didn't carry much water then, given that Golden State motorists were already paying some of the highest gas taxes in the nation. It certainly doesn't carry much water now that we have a firmer picture of where this new money is going.
On Thursday, the state's Transportation Agency announced grant recipients for some $2.6 billion of the transit funding raised by SB 1. The awards include $28.6 million for 40 zero-emission buses in Anaheim and $40.5 million for light-rail vehicles in Sacramento. Los Angeles snagged $330 million to build out its rail transit network in preparation for the 2028 Olympics.
A total of 28 projectswere awarded SB 1 money. None of them involves road upkeep at all.
The grants were supposed to be announced on April 30. Carl DeMaio, a former San Diego city councilman (and former contractor for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this website), thinks the announcement was bumped up for a political reason: The governor knew that on Friday activists looking to overturn SB 1 and all its tax and fee increases would start submitting signatures to place a repeal initiative on the November ballot.
"The governor is using the entirety of the government infrastructure to go out and hold press conferences to say everything but vote no on the gas tax [repeal]," says DeMaio, who is leading the repeal effort.
He has a point. The Transportation Agency's list of awards comes with a prominent SB 1 logo right at the top. The state government also runs a website rebuildingca.ca.gov, which describes SB1 in such neutral terms as "landmark transportation investment" and "job creator."
Democrats in the state legislature have been happy to play up this angle as well. At a press conference yesterday, Sen. Jim Beall (D–San Jose) summed up SB 1 repeal's effects on transit projects in his district: "Poof! It all goes away."
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) dismissed critics of SB 1 as fringe loonies yesterday, telling the Los Angeles Times that "local Republican leaders around the state were an important part of the SB 1 coalition, so I'm not sure how the more radical members of the party will be reconciling that in their attacks."
"This gas tax is not about fixing roads," DeMaio counters. "It about the ongoing assault against the car."
The hostility of California's climate-conscious, transit-obsessed politicians to traditional automobile travel is no secret. Gov. Jerry Brown has suggested banning all gas-powered cars. Los Angeles' explicit policy is to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled.
SB 1's spending priorities reflect this. $100 million of the state's road funding is dedicated to "active transportation"—i.e., bike lanes, sidewalks, and recreational trails. Bike lanes built with these funds often come paired with the destruction of existing car lanes, which merely adds to the California drivers' woes. Meanwhile, about 1 percent of the state's trip takers use bikes.
Another $200 million in annual road funding is allotted in "self-help" funds to counties that have increased sales taxes to fund transportation. That would make Los Angeles County eligible, as its voters passed a sales tax hike for that purpose in 2016. The county's spending plan adopts a "multi-modal" approach, meaning those sales tax dollars and "self-help" funds can easily work their way into mass transit projects.
A $250 million congested corridor relief program is similarly prohibited from being spent on adding traditional highway lane miles.
Meanwhile, taxpayers have little reason to believe that the $2.8 billion in SB1 money that is specifically earmarked for highway and local road maintenance will be spent wisely. According to a report by the Reason Foundation, California spends $84,005 per mile to maintain its highways, compared to a national average of $28,020—while ranking 46th in the quality of its urban highways.
A basic principle of transportation funding is that users should pay for the infrastructure they use. A gas tax in theory fits the bill by collecting money from the motorists, truck drivers, and transit buses to pay for the roads they drive on. California apparently prefers to spending its gas tax dollars and vehicle registration fees to pay for modes of transportation the motorists don't use.
The post California Gov. Jerry Brown Called Gas Tax Opponents 'Freeloaders.' Now He's Spending Billions of Their Money to Fund Transit They Don't Use. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When President Trump bragged in his first State of the Union address that "we have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in the history of our country," the response from Democrats was not surprising.
"Deregulation," warned Center for American Progress senior adviser Sam Berger in Fortune, "is simply a code word for letting big businesses cut corners at everyone else's expense."
Such a jaundiced definition of the term, routine though it may be on the contemporary left, would be unrecognizable to leading Democratic politicians of the late 1970s, including the president who jump-started the modern notion of deregulation: Jimmy Carter. Reclaiming that lost history may soon prove crucial in an era marked by unsustainable public sector spending obligations.
"We really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government," Carter said in his first State of the Union address, in 1978. "Bit by bit we are chopping down the thicket of unnecessary federal regulations by which government too often interferes in our personal lives and our personal business."
If that sounds more like your conception of Ronald Reagan than the peanut farmer from Plains, it may be time to check your premises.
After televised hearings chaired by Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, based on academic spade-work by the liberal economist Alfred Kahn, featuring testimony from consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Carter in 1978 signed the death warrant for the Civil Aeronautics Board, thus breaking up the regulatory cartel that had kept the same four national airlines virtually unchallenged the previous four decades.
Thus began a federal assault on "price and entry" regulations, or rules that determine which companies can compete in a given industry and what they're allowed to charge.
Carter also lifted individual prohibitions, most notably (thanks to an amendment by California Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston) on brewing beer at home. Result? You're drinking it. There were fewer than 50 breweries in the United States when Carter deregulated basement beer-making; now there are more than 5,000. In two generations, America went from world laughingstock to leader in the production of tasty lagers and ales.
Such was Carter's conviction about deconstructing chunks of the administrative state that he dwelled on it at length in his only presidential debate with Reagan.
"I'm a Southerner, and I share the basic beliefs of my region [against] an excessive government intrusion into the private affairs of American citizens and also into the private affairs of the free enterprise system," he said. "We've been remarkably successful, with the help of a Democratic Congress. We have deregulated the air industry, the rail industry, the trucking industry, financial institutions. We're now working on the communications industry."
Here in California, then fresh off its Proposition 13 tax revolt, Jerry Brown, in his first stretch as governor, was sounding similar themes. Government must "strip away the roadblocks and the regulatory underbrush that it often mindlessly puts in the path of private citizens," Brown said during his bracingly anti-statist second inaugural address in 1979. "Unneeded licenses and proliferating rules can stifle initiative, especially for small business….[M]any regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices."
These insights from the Disco Era are sorely needed today, particularly on the state and local level, where much of the price-and-entry regulatory action takes place. In the '70s, around one job in every 10 required a government-enforced occupational license; now the ratio is closer to one in three. As Kahn and other liberal economists could have told you, those licensing boards tend to be shaped by industry incumbents, who are incentivized to protect their turf.
So you have such insane regulations as Arizona's prohibition — punishable by up to six months in jail! — on using a blow dryer without a license, or Washington D.C.'s proposal that all day-care providers have a college degree. As ever when it comes to heavy-handed government, poor and minority populations are hardest hit.
Carter/Brown enthusiasm for deregulation was borne partly out of desperation: Inflation had been haunting the country for 15 unrelenting years, the natives were getting restless about predatory government, and politicians were desperate to find any low-hanging fruit.
We may be entering similarly fraught times.
With Congress set to jack the federal deficit back near the $1-trillion level right at the moment markets are forcing the cost of borrowing upward, interest payments will soon crowd out other categories of spending. As another Democrat, Bill Clinton, warned in 2012, "We've got to deal with this big long-term debt problem or it will deal with us."
And on the state and local level, public sector pension obligations—projected to increase by 50 % in California cities over the next seven years—are already forcing bureaucrats to make unpleasant choices.
Facing budget shortfalls at every level, can governments still afford to decide who can and cannot take part in certain economic activities? It's time they started asking: What would Jimmy Carter do?
This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
The post What Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown Can Teach Us About Deregulation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chalk it up to a sort of political guilty pleasure. But even though my libertarian political views are vastly different from those of Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, I've always enjoyed his philosophical ramblings and musings. He's certainly more entertaining to write about than any other California politician in memory.
There was that time at a press conference when a reporter asked him why he was cutting spending on some social program. "Because that's where the money is," he retorted (or something close to that). It was funny and refreshing—and typical Brown. At times he sounds like a fundamentalist preacher warning about the end of the world, but it's all part of that Moonbeam charm.
However, after introducing his 16th budget last week, I'm left with that same nagging feeling that's dogged me throughout his two recent terms. It's known as disappointment. Brown surely knows about the depth of the state's fiscal problems—and the fact that our public services cost far more and deliver far less than those in other states. Why hasn't he done more?
He's never seriously taken on the public sector unions that are the main obstacle to reform. He's nibbled around the edges, but that only raised expectations. His 2013 pension reform law made useful changes to that absurdly generous system, but it was in service to his main goal of raising taxes to fund the state's growing public sector. Basically, it helped convince Californians that they could trust lawmakers with new revenue by approving those Proposition 30 tax hikes.
Brown often talks about fiscal frugality, responsibility and reform, but there isn't much follow-up action. His latest budget stayed true to form. He trotted out those charts again, which show that boom years typically are followed by recession. He warned against excessive spending, even as his budget busts every spending record. Those are good points, of course.
And those $6.1 billion in surpluses this year are great news, too, but why did we need $5.2 billion in tax increases for transportation? Everyone is pleased to see the state boost the rainy day fund to $13.5 billion, but why did spending have to go up so much? Brown surely knows that California's bureaucracies are inefficient, yet his $132 billion general-fund budget enables them to function in the same old way.
Back to pensions, which are eating local governments alive: We've seen city officials trudge to Sacramento to plead for relief as the California Public Employees' Retirement System mulls another rate increase to make up for unfunded liabilities. Brown did as he often does. He said some forthright and applause-worthy things about that issue at his press conference.
"At the next downturn when things look pretty dire, [pensions] will be on the chopping block," he said. That's what those of us who have been championing pension reform have long been saying, even as union officials mock us for saying it. The next governor, he said, "will have the option of considering pension cutbacks for the first time in a long time."
The latter point references coming state Supreme Court cases that will consider the future of the so-called "California Rule," which is the main obstacle to pension reform in California. The rule—actually, a series of court precedents dating back more than 60 years—forbids government agencies from reducing pension benefits. Once a city council or legislature hikes a promised pension benefit for government workers, it can never be reduced—even going forward.
That has left localities with no viable options other than cutting services or raising taxes. It protects wealthy retirees at the expense of the state's most vulnerable residents. In fairness, Brown hasn't been totally AWOL. His legal team filed a brief with the court that pushes for changes to that rule. But he could have done much more—and much earlier in his administration.
Meanwhile, the "skinflint" governor has doggedly stuck with his plan to build a $68 billion high-speed rail system connecting Los Angeles with the Bay Area. The latest numbers show that the initial segment in the easy-to-build section of the Central Valley jumped $2.8 billion, or 35 percent. Just wait until the rail authority tries putting track over the geographically daunting Tehachapi Mountains.
I don't know why the state needs to spend so much to gain so little. We can already fly from John Wayne Airport to San Francisco International in about an hour and a half. And why is he sticking with his costly (albeit pared back) plan to tunnel underneath the California Delta?
Consider his final budget indicative of his entire administration. It's not nearly as bad as what other California Democrats would have offered. But, ultimately, it avoided the tough choices that could have set California on a better path. It's wrapped in contradictions, but it did have its refreshing and candid moments.
This column was first published in the Orange County Register.
The post California Budget in Decent Shape, but Jerry Brown Missed Vast Opportunities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Will California's high-speed rail plan go bankrupt before the state even finishes building the first leg? Maybe, if we're lucky.
On Tuesday, the officials in charge of the massive $64 billion boondoggle were formally told what everybody with any lick of sense has been saying from the start: They had wildly underestimated the costs and woefully underbudgeted just the first stretch of train construction by billions.
The first 119-mile stretch of the bullet train project in the central part of the state is going to cost $10.7 billion, which is much higher than the original $6 billion budgeted. This is actually the second time the cost for just the first leg of the project has skyrocketed. In September, the cost of the initial leg of the project jumped $1.7 billion.
None of this is a shocker to anybody who has been remotely paying attention to this project. From the very beginning, critics who analyzed the state's bullet train plan warned that the projections were way off. And deliberately so: The ballot initiative authorizing the train's construction requires that it not demand additional operational state subsidies, so there was a pretty significant incentive for the project's proponents to insist that it would be built within specifications. In 2008, a decade ago, Reason Foundation analysis determined that the projections for the costs of both building and operating the train were off by billions.
They were right. So was the Federal Railroad Administration, which predicted a year ago that the cost of this first leg would rise to $10 billion.
And to be clear, right now there does not appear to be much real thought about how this train project can actually progress beyond this initial phase. Ralph Vartabedian of the Los Angeles Times politely understates:
It remains unclear how the Central Valley cost increases will affect the total program, which under the 2016 business plan is supposed to cost $64 billion. But the jump in the Central Valley — a 77% increase above the original estimate — suggests the authority and its consultants have vastly underestimated the difficulties of buying land, obtaining environmental approvals, navigating through complex litigation and much else.
Assuming the rest of the project saw the same budget increase, the whole project would skyrocket to more than $113 billion. And you probably shouldn't assume that the project's unexpected budget increases will scale at the same rate. The train's construction will get more challenging as it heads toward San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Or maybe "if it heads toward San Francisco and Los Angeles" is a better way to talk about the train's future. This boondoggle has been propped all along the way by Gov. Jerry Brown, who is entering into his final stretch as governor this year. He has been insistent in setting aside money to keep the project going even as more Democrats within the state have been increasingly concerned.
But as the Los Angeles Times notes, they may be a little shy about speaking too loudly. Vartabedian says Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, running to succeed Brown as governor, has declined for the past two years repeated requests to be interviewed about the high-speed train project's future.
Back in 2014, though, Newsom was more vocal and public when he reversed position. Like many institutional California Democrats, he supported the bullet train at first. But then once he recognized the costs growing out of control, he turned against it. He also said at the time that many Democrats felt the way he did, but few were saying so publicly.
That was before he announced he was running for governor, though. Newsom's acknowledgement tracks with observations by Reason's Matt Welch and former editor Virginia Postrel that the political class in California knew full well this was all a fancy boondoggle designed to appeal those who glamourized zipping across the Golden State landscape in a shiny, superfast train.
Does Newsom still oppose Brown's train project? Or, assuming he becomes California's next governor, will he dip into the $13.5 billion "rainy day" fund and the state's surplus to try to keep the boondoggle going and the pockets of the train project's crony beneficiaries lined?
The post California's Boondoggle Bullet Train About to Break the Bank appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Let us now praise California's Gov. Jerry Brown, who is calling for reductions in gold-plated, unsustainable public-sector pensions in the nation's most-populous state.
Decades ago, Brown was mocked as "Governor Moonbeam" (by Mike Royko) and as a "Zen fascist" who would slaughter "un-cool" residents with "organic poison gas" (the Dead Kennedys). He was a hippie, get it, who slept on a futon, fooled around with rock-star sexpot Linda Ronstadt, and even signed off on a heterodox official portrait (see right). Horrors!
When he took office for the first time, Reason even had the temerity to praise Brown, who assumed office immediately after Ronald Reagan (who increased spending by a whopping 12.2 percent per year!), by writing in 1975:
Jerry Brown is moving in the right direction. He supports many statist measures, but he is still more libertarian than the average politician, and much more than any recent Governor of California. He is more fiscally conservative than many so-called conservative leaders, and yet is a good liberal on civil liberties questions. One thing that Brown has learned from politics that can be a lesson for everyone is his analysis of government: "Government isn't a religion. It shouldn't be treated as such. It's not God, it's humans, fallible people, feathering their nests most of the time." Let us hope that the people of California can learn something from the maverick Governor.
Man, 1975 was a loooong time ago, and suffice it to say that Brown didn't really deliver on libertarianism during his first stint as governor. Or in his second, either, where he has increased spending and became obsessed with a truly useless, criminally expensive high-speed rail project whose only contribution to humanity so far has been to inspire the second season of HBO's True Detective. His second term ends in a year and because of term limits, he can't run again. As he exits, Steve Greenhut noted last month in these pages, "Brown is taking on the public-sector unions he has spent his career empowering." Finally.
Since 1955, something called the "California Rule" has stood in the way of meaningful pension reform. The rule basically holds that public-sector employees at all levels of government had an inviolable right to the pension benefits that existed on the day they were hired. For decades, California's politicians bought votes by promising ever-better and ever-greater pension benefits that would kick in down the road after they were safely out of office, eventually creating a system that only has "68 percent of assets needed to cover its liabilities. For the fiscal year beginning in July, the state's contribution to Calpers [the nation's largest public-sector pension] is double what it was in fiscal 2009."
Absent the ability to alter pensions, states and localities have to devote more and more of their taxes to simply covering the costs of retired workers. Worse still, they often raise taxes to cover rising costs, typically at the expense of providing basic services such as police and road maintenance. In California and over a dozen other states, courts have ruled that pensions and future benefits such as health care can't be touched, forcing taxpayers alone to shoulder the burden. (The city of Bell, California is a microcosm of where this madness leads.)
But that may well change, as much out of fiscal necessity as anything else. In the Golden State, three court cases are unfolding that strike at the heart of the "California Rule." Depending on how they are resolved, the cases may give the state and local governments the right to change payouts during economic downturns as long as the lowered benefits are still considered "reasonable."
From BloombergPolitics:
Brown said he has a "hunch" the courts would "modify" the so-called California rule, which holds that benefits promised to public employees can't be rolled back. The state's Supreme Court is set to hear a case in which lower courts ruled that reductions to pensions are permissible if the payments remain "reasonable" for workers.
"There is more flexibility than there is currently assumed by those who discuss the California rule," Brown said during a briefing on the budget in Sacramento. He said that in the next recession, the governor "will have the option of considering pension cutbacks for the first time."…
"In the next downturn, when things look pretty dire, that would be one of the items on the chopping block," Brown said.
It's more than a little crazy to be hoping for a downturn so that a state can reset public-sector pensions that threaten its fiscal future. It shouldn't have to come to that and it doesn't have to. Changing from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans will solve much of the problem in a way that won't put pensioners out on the street or punish taxpayers with higher taxes and lower services (go here for a sensible public-sector pension reform plan, put together by analysts at Reason Foundation's research policy).
But until more governors follow Moonbeam's example, more legislatures change their practices, and more courts rule against all the various forms of the "California Rule," things will remain dire.
Related: 3 Reasons To Cut Public-Sector Pensions Now!
The post Gov. Jerry Brown: Courts <em>Must</em> Let California Slash its Public-Sector Pensions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed Senate Bill 169, which would have codified the Obama-era Education Department's guidance for how college campuses should deal with sexual misconduct.
What's more, he vetoed the bill on explicit due-process grounds. Accused students, guilty or not, "must be treated fairly and with the presumption of innocence until the facts speak otherwise," he wrote in a statement.
Brown's veto comes at a time when the new Education Department, led by Betsy DeVos, is revising the guidance. The Obama-era approach had prompted college officials to adopt investigatory procedures that imperiled free speech and due process. DeVos' department recently formally rescinded the most onerous of the dictates.
The California legislature tried to ensure that schools keep doing things the old way. But as Brown noted:
Thoughtful legal minds have increasingly questioned whether federal and state actions to prevent and redress sexual harassment and assault—well-intentioned as they are—have also unintentionally resulted in some colleges' failure to uphold due process for accused students. Depriving any student of higher education opportunities should not be done lightly, or out of fear of losing state or federal funding.
Given the strong state of our laws already, I am not prepared to codify additional requirements in reaction to a shifting federal landscape, when we haven't yet ascertained the full impact of what we recently enacted. We have no insight into how many formal investigations result in expulsion, what circumstances lead to expulsion, or whether there is disproportionate impact on race or ethnicity.
Brown isn't wrong to suggest that the softening of due process protections for accused students might have disproportionately affected students of color. As Emily Yoffe discussed in a thoroughly reported series for The Atlantic, there are good reasons to think minority students are much more likely to run afoul of the campus anti-rape bureaucracy.
Extraordinary message from Gov. Jerry Brown, as he vetoes bill that sought to codify Obama-era TIX guidance. Stresses due process concerns. pic.twitter.com/XvO8kNmnsD
— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) October 16, 2017
I'm pleasantly surprised that Brown vetoed this bill and released such a strong statement reaffirming the importance of due process protections. It's a brave stance that makes him an outlier within the Democratic Party, whose leaders have been far more likely to condemn DeVos for trying to tamper with the system.
The post Jerry Brown Vetoes Campus Sexual Assault Bill Because It Threatens Due Process appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
California Gov. Jerry Brown is reportedly considering a ban on all gas-powered cars.
No, seriously.
Mary Nichols, head of California's Air Resources Board, told Bloomberg News this week that Brown has been pestering her about getting a gas-car ban on the books.
"I've gotten messages from the governor asking, 'Why haven't we done something already?'" she said, adding that Brown is particularly worried that his planet-saving efforts might be outshined by those of other countries.
The United Kingdom and France have both said they will ban the sale of gas and diesel by 2040. Norway's transportation plan calls for all new passenger vehicles to be zero-emission by 2025. India wants to make the switch to electric by 2030.
But it's the People's Republic of China, currently drafting its own ill-defined ban on the production and sale of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, that is giving Brown the most grief.
Says Nichols, "The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California."
Apart from envying the autocratic powers of a communist dictatorship, Brown has not said what a ban on gas and diesel vehicles might look like. Nichols herself offers scant detail, other than saying that a complete ban on the sale of new combustion-powered vehicles could arrive as early as 2030 and that all combustion would have to be phased out by as early as 2040.
That's…optimistic. California currently has a goal of getting 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) on the road by 2025, and the prospects of reaching even this far more modest goal are in question.
Despite generous subsidies, purchases of ZEVs still hover below 3 percent of new vehicles sales. Only 13,804 were sold in California in the first quarter of 2017, out of 506,745 in total new vehicle sales.
Only 300,000 "clean vehicles," of which roughly half are partially gas-powered hybrids, have been sold in California. Purely electric vehicles are about .4 percent of the nearly 35 million registered vehicles on the state's roads.
To achieve Brown's goals, he will have to compel 99.6 percent of California drivers to trade in their gas guzzlers for electric vehicles that they currently find too expensive or too impractical. And that doesn't even touch on the issue of providing enough charging stations for these vehicles, or of generating enough electricity to power those stations.
Nor does it cover the issue of affordability. Right now, electric cars are the domain of the well-to-do. A 2016 Berkeley study found that 83 percent of those making use of California's electric vehicle subsidy program made over $100,000.
Getting the rest of the state into these cars would require massive subsidies. Even then, many might end up going without personal transportation.
How any of these practical considerations might be addressed is unknown. Right now, the ban is still just talk. But it's talk that Brown and his subordinates are taking seriously.
The post California Wants to Ban All Gas-Powered Cars appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment," Michael Shellenberger said in his keynote address at yesterday's annual meeting of the American Nuclear Society. "Nothing else—not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering—can do that." This, he declared, was one of the first principles of "atomic humanism."
Shellenberger is the founder of the pro-nuclear green group Environmental Progress, which argues that the best tool for fighting climate change is the no-carbon power generated by nuclear reactors. His speech offered a tour through the sorry history of environmentalist falsehoods and exaggerations about nuclear power.
He began with Ralph Nader, who started training activists on how to stop new nuclear plants in the 1960s. (At one inflammatory moment, Nader declared: "A nuclear plant could wipe out Cleveland, and the survivors would envy the dead.") The Sierra Club soon jumped on board the anti-nuclear campaign. Shellenberger quoted a secret 1974 memo from then-executive director Michael McCloskey: "Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation…and add to the cost of the industry." Unfortunately, this strategy worked to perfection.
What was the activists' alternative to nuclear power? Fossil fuels. For example, Nader argued that we didn't "need nuclear power" because we "have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we're owning up to…the tar sands…oil out of shale…methane in coal beds." In 1976 Sierra Club consultant Amory Lovins declared that coal "can fill the real gaps in our fuel economy with only a temporary and modest (less than twofold at peak) expansion of mining." That same year, California Gov. Jerry Brown actually advocated the construction of coal-fired plants in place of nuclear power stations.
The results? According to Shellenberger, California's carbon dioxide emissions are now two and a half times higher than they would have been had the planned nuclear plants been allowed to go forward. Meanwhile, vastly more people have died as a result of pollution from fossil fuel power generation than from nuclear power.
It gets worse. Many prominent environmentalists, worried that abundant nuclear power would lead to overpopulation, endorsed strong anti-human sentiments. As Shellenberger noted:
"Giving society cheap and abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun," said Paul Ehrlich. "It'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean and abundant energy because of what we would do with it [emphasis original]," said Amory Lovins in 1977.
"I didn't really worry about the accidents because there are too many people anyway….I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine," confessed Martin Litton, the Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California.
Shellenberger concluded by arguing for pro-nuclear activism including mass protests and sit-ins:
There is no short-cut around political engagement. Nuclear energy's opponents are well-financed and well-organized. But they have this huge achilles heel: Their entire agenda rests on a rejection of simple physics and basic ethics. They are in the wrong factually and morally. As such, when they are confronted with the truth—when it is pointed out that the emperor is wearing no clothes—they lose their power….
It's time for action. We have to move. We must confront the truth, and confront the threat. By standing up to Sierra Club, NRDC, and other anti-nuclear greenwashers, we saved nuclear plants in Illinois and New York.
A new grassroots movement, Generation Atomic, is backing measures to keep current nuclear power plants operating and also advocating the deployment of new advanced reactors. For example, Generation Atomic activists are now going door-to-door in Ohio urging voters to pressure state legislators to support the ZEN (Zero Emissions Nuclear) bill, which aims to keep both Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants operating. They note that those plants provide 90 percent of Ohio's non-carbon energy.
Though you may not agree with all of Shellenberger's arguments, his whole keynote is well worth your attention.
Bonus links: For more on new nuclear power generation technologies, go here. For more on the ways excessive regulation is boosting the costs of nuclear power, go here. For more on environmentalist opposition to nuclear power, go here.
The post 'Atomic Humanism' and the Eco-Modernist Campaign to Promote Nuclear Power appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and the state legislature mostly have avoided tackling the state's unfunded pension liabilities, even though these taxpayer-backed debts to pay for pension promises to state and local employees have soared by 22 percent in the last year alone. Earlier this month, however, the governor introduced a plan to help pay down the liabilities, but recent analyses from prominent pension reformers have been mixed.
The governor's plan is similar to the idea of pension-obligation bonds. That's when a government borrows money to pay down escalating pension debts, in the hopes "that the bond proceeds, when invested with pension assets in higher-yielding asset classes, will be able to achieve a rate of return that is greater than the interest rate owed over the term of the bonds," according to an explanation from the Government Finance Officers Association.
The governor's plan, by contrast, would borrow money from the Surplus Money Investment Fund, a low-interest (around 1 percent) account where the state holds money to pay for short-term expenses. It would then make a supplemental $6 billion payment to the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which currently predicts a rate of return of 7 percent (even though last fiscal year it received only 0.61 percent). If the CalPERS fund performs as predicted, it will allow the state to save $11 billion in pension liabilities over two decades.
"Absent additional action to address these growing liabilities, paying off retirement liabilities will require an increasing percentage of the state budget. For example, the state's contributions to CalPERS are on track to nearly double from $5.8 billion ($3.4 billion General Fund) in 2017?18 to $9.2 billion ($5.3 billion General Fund) in 2023?24," according to the May budget revision's summary. This is purportedly a painless way to pay down growing pension debts.
The idea got a boost from one of California's best-known pension reformers, Sen. John Moorlach, an Orange County Republican who recently introduced a package of pension reform bills in the Senate. They were all killed by majority Democrats. Nevertheless, Moorlach wrote, in a column for Fox & Hounds, that he wishes the governor's prepayment plan had "a little more sizzle to make it an even more interesting opportunity."
"Governor Brown should ask the board of CalPERS what type of incentive they will give the state for the prepayment," he wrote. "CalPERS will benefit from the large influx and should provide at least a 3.75 percent reduction on the actuarially calculated required contribution." That's unlikely to happen, of course, but Moorlach wrote that he likes the Brown proposal and thinks the governor should move forward with it.
The idea follows the lead of the Orange County city of Newport Beach, explained Ed Mendel, in his May 29 Calpensions article. The city is paying down its pension debt to CalPERS as quickly as possible, helping it avoid the possible fate of other cities. Mendel quotes Modesto's acting city manager, who told the Modesto Bee "he is hearing that many cities are facing bankruptcy over rising pension costs." In the case of looming fiscal trouble, most say slashing at debt is a good idea.
But not everyone is so favorably disposed toward the governor's plan. David Crane, a Stanford University lecturer and president of Govern for California, argues in a column that the plan is terrible precedent that transfers more pension costs from the beneficiaries of the pension system to the state's taxpayers. When the state makes pension promises to employees, he wrote, both the state and the employees make contributions into the system, which he refers to as "normal costs."
By contrast, when agencies increase benefit levels or stock-market earnings go down, the pension funds face those "unfunded liabilities," which are the unfunded promises they've already made to current retirees and employees. CalPERS currently is 74 percent funded, which means that 26 percent of those promises are unfunded. "In contrast to joint sharing of normal cost, employees don't share in the cost of unfunded liabilities," he wrote. "One hundred percent of that cost falls on citizens, whose services get crowded out and taxes get raised to pay off the liabilities."
Borrowing these taxpayer funds to pay off the pension debt, he explains, would just let CalPERS continue to set these shared "normal costs" at an unfairly low rate. Furthermore, Crane notes that this special fund is funded entirely by taxpayers, so he fears the state will borrow from other special funds. The state could claim that these monies are going to pay for public services, when in reality they are being siphoned off for pensions.
As Former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's pension adviser, Crane wrote that he helped Schwarzenegger "engineer 'Deficit Reduction Bonds' as a way to address the deficit he acquired upon taking office." But he now regrets the move: "Those borrowings didn't solve anything. They just covered up the problem, with interest to boost."
State and local governments are understandably in a bind. They have "few ways to slow the rapidly climbing cost, among them: cut staff and services, lower pensions for new hires, get unionized employees to pay more for their pensions or cut salaries," explained Mendel. He noted the key obstacle limiting the ability of governments to cut pension accruals in the future is something called the "California Rule," which is making its way to the state Supreme Court.
For some, then, shuffling funds around to prepay a little pension debt seems like a cost-free no-brainer to likely limit the growth of the debts. But to others, it's just a shell game that evades the more politically dangerous course of tackling the size of those benefits head on—and running into powerful resistance from the state's public-employee unions
The post Jerry Brown's Pension Plan Gets Mixed Reviews From Reformers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Gov. Jerry Brown has a plan to address his state's hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities: Borrow money at low rates and invest it in a hopefully higher-yielding state pension fund.
Over the past two decades, several states and localities have borrowed to cover exploding pension liabilities. But the practice is fraught with risk, and it has backfired spectacularly on more than a few occasions. The City of Oakland, for instance, lost $250 million on a similar borrow-and-invest pension funding scheme when projected returns did not pan out. When New Jersey tried borrowing to cover pension obligations, it ended up being charged with securities fraud.
These risks do not seem to bother Brown, whose pension proposal—released as part of his "May Revision" budget—calls for borrowing $6 billion from a state savings account at 1.5 to 3.5 percent interest rates and investing that money in CalPERS, the state's pension investment fund, which Brown is counting on to make 7 percent returns.
If all goes according to the governor's plan, that $6 billion investment will be enough to save $11 billion in pension costs and pay back the state savings account. But that's a pretty big "if," especially given CalPERS' recent track record.
In 2014 CalPERS had a return target of 7.8 percent. Instead it brought in a measly 2.4 percent. That was bad, but at least it was better than 2015's .61 percent return. Last year saw a jump to 5.8 percent—better, but still far below what Brown needs.
Meanwhile, an economic downturn could wreak havoc with CalPERS' already depressed returns. Indeed, recessions are the main reason this approach to budgeting is so inherently risky.
A comprehensive study by Boston College's Center for Retirement Research found that states and localities that borrowed funds to cover pension obligations in the years leading up to an economic contraction overwhelmingly witnessed negative returns. CalPERS itself saw a negative 24 percent return on investment during the worst of the Great Recession.
Brown is clearly aware of this recessionary risk, saying as he announced his pension proposal that "an economic recovery won't last forever." So why is he pushing a proposal that depends on an ongoing economic recovery? The answer, according to that Boston College study, is necessity: Financial pressure, not fiscal wisdom, plays the biggest role in which states and localities go for this option. California currently faces a $5.8 billion budget shortfall, forcing the governor to scramble for any savings he can find.
Needless to say, that's not how the governor justified his move. He claims his proposal would "reduce unfunded liabilities and stabilize state contribution rates." A little context: California is looking at anywhere from $242 billion to $767 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Even if Brown gets those $11 billion, the money will be a drop in the bucket compared to the tab coming due.
The post California Uses One State Credit Card To Pay Off Another appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California's newly passed transportation package will nearly double drivers' gas taxes. Don't like that? Then Gov. Jerry Brown thinks you're a freeloader.
"The freeloaders—I've had enough of them," Brown announced in Orange County earlier this month. "Roads require money to fix." Without an increase in the gas tax, he argued, Californians might have to drive on gravel.
Anger has been building at the governor since he signed the tax hike into law in late April. (The levies are scheduled to come into effect in November.) Brown's state already has the seventh highest gas taxes in the nation, and that money pays for much more than road repair. About $100 million of gas tax revenue—2 percent of the total—is diverted straight into the general fund every year, and another 7 percent goes to public transit.
"California has plenty of money to fix our roads," says state Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach), arguing that no increase would be necessary if the state would stop siphoning off revenue earmarked for road maintenance and repair.
Allen points out that about $1 billion a year of transportation revenue is diverted to the general fund. Almost all of that comes from "weight fees" imposed on heavier vehicles, money that is supposed to cover the damage they do to roadways.
Brown's transportation package raises the state's gas excise tax from 18 cents to 30 cents a gallon, and diesel excise taxes from 16 to 36 cents a gallon. A special sales tax on diesel would jump from 1.75 percent to 5.75 percent. Car registration fees would increase by at least $25 and as much as $175, depending on the value of a vehicle.
Where is the money going? At least $100 million a year will be spent trying to increase the number of trips taken by bicycle or on foot through California's Active Transportation Program. (How effective is the program? Since it was created in 2013, the number of Californians commuting by bike increased from 1 percent to just 1.1 percent.) Another $330 million will go to the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program, which funnels taxpayers' money to "transformative" transit projects such as California's high-speed rail system, currently running 50 percent over budget and seven years behind schedule.
Another $300 million is slated for the State Transit Assistance fund, which helps local agencies pay for streetcars and light rail systems. About $54 million would go to the Department of Parks and Recreation, and $17.3 million is headed toward the Department of Food and Agriculture.
These kinds of expenditures make the governor's rhetoric about road repair ring "hollow," Allen argues. "Fully 30 percent of funds will not be spent on roads." And there's no guarantee that still more of the transportation money won't be diverted into the general fund.
Allen wants to put Brown's transportation package on the November 2018 ballot for a yes-or-no vote by the people of California. Twice in this century, Californians have approved ballot initiatives intended to prevent gas tax revenue from being diverted to non-transportation-related uses.
Right now Allen's initiative is being reviewed by the state attorney general, who is expected to approval a title ballot summary by July 8. From there, Allen and his allies will have 150 days to gather the 365,000 signatures required for getting on the ballot.
This means signatures for Allen's initiative will be due in early December, about a month after Brown's gas taxes go into effect. Allen is optimistic about his proposal's chances. "Californians are just beginning to realize the magnitude of the cost they are going to be hit with, and they're outraged," he says.
The post California Gov. Jerry Brown Calls Gas Tax Hike Foes 'Freeloaders' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislators have caused a stir with their plan, which passed the legislature on Thursday, to increase taxes to pay for the state's unquestionably decrepit infrastructure of roads and bridges. Instead of thinking of this as a new transportation tax, however, Californians should see it as a pension tax, given the extra money plugs a hole caused by growing retirement payments to public employees.
Consider this sobering news from the CalMatters' Judy Lin in January: "New projections show the state's annual bill for retirement obligations is expected to reach $11 billion by the time Brown leaves office in January 2019—nearly double what it was eight years earlier." That's the state's "annual bill," i.e., the direct costs taken from the general-fund budget. That number doesn't even include those "unfunded" pension liabilities that according to some estimates top $1 trillion.
That's more than double the $5.2 billion a year the Brown administration hopes to raise from a plan that would boost gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon, raise the vehicle-license fee by $25 to $175 a year (depending on the value of the vehicle), impose a $100 annual fee on electric cars because they don't currently pay gas taxes and include a large hike on diesel fuel. Money is fungible, so if the state overspends on pensions, it has to make it up somewhere else.
The story refers to the Public Employees' Pension Reform Act of 2013, which was the governor's only attempt in his administration to rein in pension costs. Because that reform applies to new state hires, it won't produce noticeable savings for years, the article explains. As I've often noted, it also was unnecessarily modest and exceedingly cynical.
The governor's original plan included some serious reform ideas, including a proposed hybrid system that nudged public employees away from the debt-laden "defined-benefit" plans they now enjoy toward a mixed plan that included some elements of a 401/k program. But he didn't push for it. Instead, he caved in to his union allies.
Here's where cynicism comes in: The transparent goal was not to fix the broken pension system, but to woo voter support for Proposition 30, the laughably titled "Temporary Taxes to Fund Education" initiative. The measure raised sales and income taxes. The "temporary" moniker is laughable because Prop. 30 backers asked voters to extend the income-tax portion of the taxes by a dozen years in 2016, and they obliged. (It's a safe guess those taxes won't just expire in 2030—at least not without another union-backed attempt to extend them.)
At the time, the state budget crisis was in the news, as were soaring public-pension liabilities. Polling looked dismal for Brown's pet tax increase, which was the linchpin of his effort to bring the state out of its deficit. He had to convince voters that the state was serious about reforming itself. And, voilà, the PEPRA legislation was born. Voters obliged by OK'ing the tax hike, and then legislators and the governor quickly moved past the pension issue.
Fast forward five years and the state has another big problem. Its general-fund budgets have remained balanced. But Democrats and Republicans alike have been complaining about the estimated $130-billion backlog in infrastructure of all types, especially after the crumbling emergency spillway at Oroville Dam caused the evacuation of 188,000 people in the Sacramento Valley this year. And once again the governor turns to a tax-increase plan.
Polling shows the public dubious of the tax plan. Californians oppose the myriad tax-hike proposals, but overwhelmingly agree (61 percent) with Republicans that instead of raising taxes, the California Department of Transportation,Caltrans, should "make better use of revenue." Instead of seeking voter approval for a tax hike, the governor needed only convince a supermajority of legislators in a Legislature where Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses. Only one Republican backed the tax, and only one Democrat voted against it.
The joint Assembly and Senate GOP statement is on point: "Our state has become increasingly unaffordable for ordinary Californians. We can fix our roads and bridges by simply ensuring that the billions of dollars that drivers are already paying in transportation fees and taxes are actually used for transportation purposes, rather than being swept into the state's general fund."
The governor noted that, yes, roads cost money and compared it to ignoring a leaky roof on one's house—it gets worse if you ignore it. True, but Brown does the same dance each year. He introduces a budget that dramatically underfunds transportation, then holds it hostage to a tax hike. He continues to raise salaries for public employees, which also raises those pension contributions, but he won't deal with roads and bridges without a tax. And he won't deal with pension costs and other major problems that would free up money for roads.
And he won't reform the way Caltrans currently is spending its money. The Legislative Analyst's Office in 2014 noted that Caltrans is "overstaffed by about 3,500 full-time equivalents beginning in 2014-15 at a cost of more than $500 million." The Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters put it more directly when he referred to union "featherbedding" at the agency.
Not much has been done in the ensuing years to fix that problem borne of outsized union influence, yet the governor is back crying poormouth and insisting the state's hard-pressed workers increase their monthly gas outlays.
Furthermore, California taxpayers receive a really poor bang for the buck when it comes to transportation thanks to the state's ill-performing bureaucracy and outdated union rules. "California spends over $400,000 per state-controlled mile of road. Texas, in contrast, spends less than half that—$177,000 per mile," according to Reason Foundation's Baruch Feigenbaum, writing in the Orange County Register last October.
It's not just unions that are at fault, of course. Gov. Brown remains fixated on building the $68-billion-plus High Speed Rail system that is supposed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. If the governor had as much zeal for fixing freeways and levees as he has for a system that seems unnecessary (Southwest Airlines will get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in around half the time of the best estimates of the proposed bullet train), the state might have more cash to deal with the problem.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association points out that general-fund spending has gone up $36 billion in the last six years and that additional money has not been used for transportation. There always are other spending plans, even though infrastructure—rather than new social spending—is supposed to be one of state government's top priorities.
Even the current proposal has some odd "infrastructure" line items. As the California Policy Center's Marc Joffe points out, the $52.4 billion plan (over 10 years) would spend $7.5 billion on public transportation and $1 billion on bicycle and pedestrian lanes. Those items have value, of course, but the tax hike is supposed to fund critical priorities.
The good news is the state finally is getting serious about addressing its long-neglected infrastructure backlog, but let's not forget the backlog wouldn't be nearly as large had our state's leaders dealt seriously with its growing pension problem—or at least tried to take on union interests that misspend scarce resources and drive up the cost of repairs. Think about that when you watch your own transportation costs mushroom.
This column was first published by the California Policy Center.
The post California Road-Tax Hike Is Really A Pension Tax appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week Rep. Thomas Massie introduced a bill to abolish the Department of Education. To judge from the number of people in my social-media feeds who think this would be a step into the Stone Age, it isn't widely remembered that the department is fairly young—Jimmy Carter carved it out of the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1979—and that the politics surrounding it have rarely fallen into a neat left/right split.
That was especially true when the department was being born. The National Education Association supported it, of course—it was basically a gift to the group. But the other major teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, was opposed—again because it was a gift to the NEA. One of the country's leading civil rights groups, the National Urban League, was in favor. But the Congressional Black Caucus was suspicious, and Rep. Shirley Chisholm became one of the proposal's leading opponents. "It seems to me that many of your professional associations would love to see the creation of this separate Department," she said, "but those groups in this country who do not have the powerful lobby groups, who do not have the financial resources, such as the Indians, the disadvantaged youngsters, the Hispanic youngsters…these are the groups that are apt to get lost in a separate Department of Education, where the focus is going to be brought to bear on the part of very powerful groups in this country."
The press wasn't enthusiastic either. The New York Times condemned the proposal in an editorial headlined "Centralizing Education Is No Reform." And when The Washington Post tackled the topic, its editorial began: "Once in a while a bill comes along that is so thoroughly bad that most legislators who support it come to regret their vote."
While the liberals went to war with each other, some conservatives decided the new department could be an instrument for advancing their own favorite policies. Republicans started tacking amendments to the bill, covering topics from abortion to busing; one declared that the department would permit school prayer. Many of these were meant more as poison pills than as serious proposals. But even after they were stripped out, some prominent conservatives wound up backing the legislation. Looking back from 2017, the congressional vote is full of surprises: Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott voted to create the department, while Chisholm, John Conyers, and Charles Rangel all voted no.
Over the following years, some of the issues that seemed relevant in 1979 dimmed in importance. A lot of liberal opposition to the department, especially in the civil rights community, boiled down to "We know how to lobby for our causes at HEW; disrupting that could put us at a disadvantage." Once they started adjusting to the new order, that wasn't such a concern anymore. Still, as late as 1992, two Democratic presidential candidates—Jerry Brown and Bob Kerrey—called for euthanizing the department. Brown, denouncing it as "a massive bureaucratic waste" that "educates no student," said he'd move some of its functions to other parts of the federal government and devolve the rest to the states. Kerrey wanted to consolidate it and several other seats of the Cabinet into a new Department of Human Resources.
Conservatives, meanwhile, fell into a love/hate relationship with Carter's creation. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan pledged to abolish it. But once the GOP actually controlled the education bureaucracy and found it could be used to push for "national standards" and suchlike, more than a few Republicans made their peace with it. To this day there's a tension between the conservatives who'd kill the department and those who prefer to bend it to their own uses. I've known a few who seem to waver between the two positions, regaining their passion for abolishing it whenever a Democrat is elected and losing interest when he leaves office.
Give Massie and his cosponsors credit: They're standing by their position even under a Republican president and a sympathetic secretary. We may soon see how many others in the House and Senate agree.
The post The Ever-Shifting Politics of the Department of Education appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Comeback: How a "Failed State" Became a Model for the Nation, by Narda Zacchino, St. Martin's Press, 328 pages, $26.99
All Texans know that Texas is the greatest state in the country. Many national observers would disagree, of course; they often do so for no apparent reason and with what I would describe as an objectively disproportionate degree of hostility. Narda Zacchino, a writer from California, is one such example. Her new book, California Comeback, sets out to explain how the state, which suffered more than most during the Great Recession, has turned things around.
Her goal, actually, is even more ambitious than that. "California," she writes, "has become the economic, social, and political model of the twenty-first century, which stands in contrast to the alternative examples of Texas, Kansas, Florida, and others hobbled by right-wing ideology."
As recently as a few years ago, California was the functional equivalent of a clown stepping on a rake and then bursting into flames, but matters appear to have improved somewhat since then. There seems to be an intriguing story to be told about the state's recent history, and the sheer swagger of Zacchino's opening salvo raised my hopes that it would be one with a happy ending.
It's not easy to wrap your head around a state as large, complex, and dynamic as California. It has 38 million people. If it were a standalone country, its economy would rank as the seventh largest in the world. Its politics are incomprehensible. California is a blue state, but it had a Republican governor as recently as 2010 and, furthermore, that governor was The Terminator.
Zacchino's résumé includes 31 years at the Los Angeles Times followed by six as deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. She has amassed nearly four decades' worth of expertise on a substantively interesting circus, and she uses it to relitigate the relative merits of Texas vs. California. Zacchino claims that this is a "grudge match, manufactured in large part by the media and politicians."
To be fair, there are a lot of Texans who talk about California as a rival. Former Gov. Rick Perry has done so many times, and he capers through her book with the rambunctious vim that recently dazzled viewers of Dancing with the Stars. I understand what Zacchino is getting at when she says that people like me, including me specifically (I wrote a book on Texas in 2013), were "piling onto the meme" that Texas and California represent a study in contrasts between what one pro-Texas partisan summarized as "two opposing versions of the American dream, one based on liberty, the other, government."
The person she's quoting there, though, is Chuck DeVore, a former state assemblyman from Orange County. Texans don't actually define our state in opposition to California—not even Perry does, come to that.
Californians shouldn't either. There are good things happening in the Golden State, but having read Zacchino's book, my impression is that it's still struggling with the collective cognitive dissonance that seems to be at the root of its most painful public travails.
The passage of Proposition 187, in 1994, is a good example. The measure—which sought to establish a statewide citizenship screening system for unauthorized immigrants and bar them from using nonemergency health care services—was struck down by the courts, and Republicans have subsequently paid a heavy electoral price for having championed its passage. Even today, though, there's a kind of bewildered anguish in the accounts that Californians give of the saga, and Zacchino's is no exception. California, she explains, is not the kind of state one would expect to embrace a draconian approach to illegal immigration, much less a punitive attitude to the migrants themselves. California is supposed to be better than that. It's the red states, like Texas, that one would expect to succumb to the ills of intolerance.
"Still, the measure passed," concedes Zacchino. She hastens to add that "Texans might have voted for a Proposition 187–type measure given the opportunity, but there is no initiative process there." That's true. But it's also true that in 2001, via the old-fashioned techniques we still use down here, Texas adopted a state-level dream Act that extended in-state tuition at our public universities to non-citizen students who came to the U.S. illegally as children.
It's not hard to understand why Texas' elected officials would take such a forward-thinking approach to the subject, if you step away from the stereotypes for a second and think about the facts. It doesn't make much sense to soapbox about how unauthorized immigrants are taking advantage of your lavish welfare state when no such thing exists.
Ultimately, I'm dubious that the "California model" Zacchino is touting is entirely coherent. There is, of course, a "blue-state" analogue to the red-state model that Texas has come to represent, and it has served certain states well. Massachusetts, for instance, may not be a job-creating machine, but it doesn't need to be. It's a relatively small state, and its comparatively expansive public sector is funded by one of the most highly educated workforces in the country.
California has so many eccentricities that it doesn't seem like a particularly useful paradigm, especially since one of them is the kind of magical thinking that explains its relatively recent flirtation with fiscal disaster. As far as I can tell, California's "comeback" is being single-handedly engineered by its governor, Jerry Brown, who has been busy MacGyvering the largest economy in the nation back from the brink since returning to Sacramento in 2010. He's also been routinely harassed by environmental activists while doing so. Zacchino presents that side of the story as if it helps make the case for the California way, but her account of the state's recent fight over hydraulic fracturing points to an underlying problem with the concept.
In 2013, Brown signed legislation establishing regulations on fracking, rather than fighting to place a moratorium on the technique. This was, according to Zacchino, "disconcerting and confusing to environmentalists who had consistently been in his corner," and "his past reputation was not enough to protect him from the fury of greens on this issue." In October of that year, he was confronted by Paul Rogers, a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News, who asked Brown to explain how he could reconcile his support of fracking with his stated belief that climate change represents an existential threat to the world.
For the record: This is not a very good gotcha question. It can be answered by referring the concerned citizen to Google, which he can use to look up the 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study "The Future of Natural Gas." Brown, more politely, explained the key takeaway: "In terms of the larger fracking question—natural gas—because of that, and the lowered price, the carbon footprint of America has been reduced because of the substitution of natural gas for coal."
This was, according to Zacchino, "a rare incoherent sentence" from Brown and, moreover, "perhaps a bit disingenuous" on his part. She also warns that the governor's stance on the issue "may not be enough for the public." A 2014 poll found that 68 percent of California voters were in favor of a bill reviving the call for a moratorium, although it ultimately failed after the the oil industry, which she says "has more clout than the voters," spent $1.5 million lobbying against it.
It's puzzling that California's environmentalists weren't more receptive to Brown's point that natural gas is displacing coal. He's correct about the energy portfolio, and his stated commitment to addressing climate change is backed by a decades-long record as one of America's most influential tree huggers.
In Zacchino's account, Brown made his decision after analysts at the California Department of Finance concluded that a moratorium would have adverse effects on jobs and revenue. Those considerations are surely germane if you're the governor of a state in dire need of both. Yet Zacchino seems to believe that stopping all fracking is the normatively correct approach, and many Californians apparently agree.
The whole saga suggests that a key component of the California model is refusing to accept that life is not actually a dream. But given that a policy of ferocious idealism has been known to result in multibillion-dollar budget shortfalls, the moral picture is a little murkier than that. Brown has walked his state back from the edge largely by resisting the utopianism that got it there in the first place. His constituents should consider that.
The book's Manichean outlook makes no sense. Zacchino laments that "to the extent that environmental problems are admitted at all in Texas, they are seen as quantitative technical challenges to be adapted to rather than qualitative moral dilemmas that must be faced." No state is perfect, but Texas was the first in the nation to pass legislation mandating disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking in 2011. California followed suit three years later.
It's always nice to see parts of the Lone Star model implemented successfully abroad.
The post California Should Be More Like Texas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Arizona's Goldwater Institute has been the national leader in promoting "right to try" legislation, which allows terminally-ill Americans to legally try medications that have passed just Phase I of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval process but are not as yet legally available via doctors. Passing Phase I means that the agency is at least satisfied that the medicine can be used safely.
Today the Institute announces that, with a bill signed into law by California Gov. Jerry Brown, that state becomes the 32nd state to pass a version of that law. Brown had vetoed a similar law last year. The Institute's press release notes that "Right To Try is limited to patients with a terminal disease that have exhausted all approved treatment options and cannot enroll in a clinical trial. All medications available under the law must have successfully completed basic safety testing and be part of the FDA's on-going approval process."
KPCC radio's website has more details on the California politics:
Patients must meet a number of requirements to qualify for the program, including that they have only a matter of months to live and that two doctors recommend they try the experimental drug.
The passage of the measure caps a two-year effort by Calderon. Last year, Brown vetoed similar legislation Calderon authored. The governor said he did so because he first wanted to see whether changes in the FDA's Compassionate Use program reduced the minimum 30-day wait for experimental drugs.
And while the feds did streamline some parts of that program, patient wait times remained the same, the bill's supporters say.
Alex Manning's Reason TV video on the right-to-try movement:
The post California Becomes 32nd State to Pass "Right to Try" Law for Terminally Ill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A raft of bills intended to restrict Californians' rights to possess or exchange their weapons went to Gov. Jerry Brown's desk this week, and today he signed six and vetoed five of them.
Via a press release from the pro-Second Amendment Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), with descriptions that reflect their perspective, a list of the six signed and four of the five vetoed. (The last one on the vetoed list was not discussed by the FPC). The names in parenthesis are those of the legislator who introduced the bills. The [bracketed] interpolations are by me:
The five vetoed by Brown:
In an emailed press release from FPC, they noted regarding the signed SB 1446 that its:
statewide, confiscatory ban on lawfully-possessed "large-capacity" magazines [can be evaded by] law enforcement interests [who] once again cut shady deals to exempt their retired members from the long reach of the new gun control laws.
Earlier this year, Firearms Policy Coalition, two other civil rights groups, and a number of individuals filed a federal civil rights lawsuit–captionedGarcia v. Attorney General Kamala Harris–that challenges California's gun law exemptions for retired law enforcement officers on Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection grounds.
California should have already learned that bills like 1446 that require confiscations of widely and innocently owned items can be expensive (and pointless) to enforce from its past attempts to take away previously legally owned weapons from people whose later actions placed them in prohibited categories.
No one who cares about civil liberties should cheer the newly minted creation of overwhelmingly harmless contraband. No compensation will be provided for the now banned over-10-capacity magazines, which must be destroyed, sold, or turned in by July 1, 2017. A brand-new excuse for police searches of the innocent is thus created, one with a built-in excuse for police to feel "endangered."
I reported on versions of many of these bills passing the state Senate in May.
I wrote in the Orange County Register in December about why California doesn't need new gun laws.
Steven Greenhut wrote here about how most of these bills qualify far more as harassment of the innocent than any kind of insurance of public safety. Greenhut observed: "The number of guns owned by Californians has soared over the past two decades, and the population has grown dramatically—yet firearms-related deaths have fallen over the years. Is gun violence a problem of gun supply by legal owners or the behavior of criminals?"
Correction: The headline originally mistakenly said only four gun-related bills were vetoed today.
The post Governor Jerry Brown Signs Six, Vetoes Five Gun-Right Restricting Bills appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Governor Jerry Brown has endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in an "open letter" on his personal website, one week before voters go to the polls in the state's primary.
Real Clear Politics' average of five major polls puts Clinton eight percentage points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has insisted he will take his insurgent campaign all the way to July's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. FiveThirtyEight currently gives Clinton a 96 percent chance of winning the Golden State's primary, which combined with the superdelegates who have pledged to vote for her at the convention would clinch the nomination for Clinton.
In his endorsement, Gov. Brown wrote that he is "deeply impressed with how well Bernie Sanders has done" running "a similar campaign" to the one he ran against Clinton's husband, Bill, in 1992. Brown praised Sanders' focus on income inequality but ultimately decided that uniting behind Clinton "is the only path forward to win the presidency and stop the dangerous candidacy of Donald Trump."
Reason's Matt Welch noted earlier this year that Brown's 1992 protest-campaign for president was more than similiar to Sanders' when it came to apocalyptic invocations of "corrupt money" and society collapsing over income inequality. Brown essentially wrote Sanders' left-wing populist presidential playbook (which was also aped by Ralph Nader, several times) more than two decades ago.
However, as Reason's Jesse Walker wrote in The American Conservative, Brown has worn many political faces throughout his very long political career, which includes two stints as governor four decades apart. Even in 1992, as Brown was tacking hard-left, he proposed a flat tax and abolishing the Department of Education, two positions it's hard to imagine Vermont's celebrity democratic socialist taking on.
It should also be noted — given the near-panic in mainstream Democratic circles over "Bernie Bros" not dutifully lining up behind Clinton fast enough — that Brown never endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992, and despite losing handily in the primaries, Brown continued his campaign all the way to the convention.
There's also a palpable anxiety among mainstream Democrats that Sanders supporters will disrupt what the party hopes will be a perfectly choreographed love-fest in support of Clinton in Philadelphia, and not a repeat of what Brown's supporters did in 1992 when they interrupted Hillary Clinton's speech with "Let Jerry Speak!" chants.
For those who think the 2016 Democratic campaign has been somehow exceptionally divisive and potentially harmful to "party unity," watch then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton point his finger at Brown and tell him, "You're not worth being on the same platform as my wife."
The post Gov. Jerry Brown Offers Tepid Endorsement of Hillary Clinton One Week Before California Primary appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The $15 minimum wage just went from "laughable" to "viable"—as a New York Times headline put it—to the law of the land for millions of New York and California residents.
In April 2016, the Empire and Golden states almost simultaneously passed laws that will boost the state-mandated wage floor to $15 over the next few years for all workers—a high-stakes bet that the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to human labor.
To discuss the potential impact of the $15 minimum wage, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Don Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, who writes frequently about the minimum wage at his blog, Cafe Hayek.
About 9:30 minutes.
Produced and edited by Jim Epstein. Camera by Joshua Swain and Todd Krainin.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube Channel to get automatic notifications when new material goes live.
The post The Cruelty of the $15 Minimum Wage appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Gov. Jerry Brown simply does not care about what will happen to citizens in non-urban parts of the state under a $15 minimum wage.
He didn't literally say that, but what he did say when today was that he understood that there may be some bad outcomes for such a massive, unprecedented mandate. And then he signed it into law anyway.
Here's the quote of what he said. Look for one little adverb that indicated (probably accidentally) exactly why the law was passed, even though Brown has previously been resistant to it:
Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally, socially, and politically they make every sense because it binds the community together to make sure parents can take care of their kids.
The key word is "politically." Politics don't hold communities together. But they can keep entrenched interests in power.
Read more from Brown's signing here, my analysis (and others) on the potential terrible impact of the increase here and here (including interactions with California labor law that nobody is even talking about), and note that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also signed a $15 minimum wage law today.
The post Gov. Brown Admits $15 Minimum Wage Does Not Make Economic Sense, Approves It Anyway appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Leaked documents show that the California high speed rail is reversing course—quite literally—and changing construction plans on the first 250-mile stretch of track. The new plan will now connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area—not Los Angeles as originally planned.
The San Jose Mercury News got their hands on a draft report detailing the route change:
"In the draft report obtained Wednesday by this newspaper, the authority says it had to change course to keep costs down, in large part because the southern segment will entail expensive tunneling costs through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel mountains.
Getting even a significant portion of the project built early—by 2025—would help its political survival. And, as the report notes, the Silicon Valley-to-Central Valley line will better position the state to attract private investors, whom Gov. Jerry Brown and supporters of the project hope will pay for part of the cost…"
News of the route change comes in the same week consultants projected a $260 million increase in additional costs for the first 22-mile leg of construction—which amounts to a five percent increase in price for a project that has yet to lay a single foot of track.
The proposed change may also violate state law.
California Assemblyman David Hadley (R-South Bay) told local radio station KFI 640 AM that the new route potentially goes against a provision in the high speed rail legislation that says the train must first connect to Los Angeles. He stated the language was added to ensure Southern Californians didn't foot the bill for a train that could very well end up becoming a regional transportation project.
Hadley is introducing legislation next week that would take a portion of funds away from the high speed rail project based on the new plans to build north.
The route change is only the latest in a line of broken promises made by the California rail authority. Voters approved the project with a $33 billion price tag—that has since doubled to $68 billion and could go even higher. Construction is already over two years behind schedule and the state has still not disclosed how they plan to raise the $53 billion in additional funds to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco track.
The sad part is that the problems with the high speed rail project were entirely predictable. As Reason's Scott Shackford wrote last October:
"Don't blame us for this eminently predictable disaster in the making. The Reason Foundation warned all the way back in 2008 that, among other things: cost overruns were likely, state and federal funding would not be sufficient to cover the costs of the project, the state would have to spend more money, and private investors would not be making up the difference. And that's exactly what is happening. Read more of those predictions here."
And while the boondoggle continues to move forward, residents in the Central Valley are getting screwed out of their property for a project that may never be completed. Reason TV recently visited with those who are being affected by the project. You can hear their stories in the video below:
The post Surprise! California's High Speed Rail Breaks Major Promise in New Plan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his State of the State address last month, California Gov. Jerry Brown said he wants to pass new taxes to pay for the state's backlog of infrastructure maintenance: "Our overall state-deferred maintenance is staggering, estimated to total $77 billion… That means at some point, sooner rather than later, we have to bite the bullet and enact new fees and taxes for this purpose. Ideology and politics stand in the way, but… the roads must be fixed."
Brown's critics wonder why he won't "bite the bullet" and pull the plug on two controversial large-scale infrastructure projects that have an estimated tab that exceeds that $77 billion figure. If he believed the state's crumbling roads and bridges were such a priority, why doesn't he focus on that problem rather than on a $68-billion high-speed rail project and a $15-billion ($25 billion including related environmental projects) plan to drill tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, they ask?
The projects might be useful but few call them essential. The bullet train to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco is unlikely to come close to the promised 2-hour-40-minute travel times given the latest plan would have trains share commuter tracks as they enter the crowded suburbs of both metropolitan areas. Backers have struggled to conform to the funding and cost promises made in the 2008 Proposition 1A ballot measure authorizing initiation of the project, which has emboldened those who want another public vote.
The twin-tunnels project doesn't promise to necessarily bring more water to Southern farms and cities, but rather hopes to create a more reliable supply of water by protecting the endangered Delta smelt—and thereby reducing the need to occasionally shut down the pumps at Tracy to protect them. It's a more fundamental issue than the rail line, but tunnel foes have argued instead for a less-costly plan of shoring up the levees that currently hold back the Sacramento River water as it makes its way through the estuary to the water pumps.
A number of legislators are not only asking about the governor's infrastructure priorities, but proposing ways to redirect scarce resources from these big-ticket items toward the basics. Two prominent Republican officials, Sen. Bob Huff of Diamond Bar, the former minority leader, and Board of Equalization member George Runner of Lancaster, have proposed an initiative that would redirect most of the currently authorized bond proceeds from the rail project toward water storage. It seemed like a political poke in the eye of the governor, but it might get legs as Central Valley rail critics in particular get energized by the idea.
Two Democratic legislators representing Delta-area districts, Assemblywoman Susan Tallamantes Eggman of Stockton and Sen. Lois Wolk of Davis, have introduced legislation that would require California voters to approve in a statewide ballot initiative the tunnel plan. Currently, the governor says no vote of the people or Legislature is necessary to move forward on it.
An independent voter measure, by Stockton farmer Dino Cortopassi, is called the "No Blank Checks" initiative. Currently, California voters must approve any projects funded through general-obligation bonds, which is debt backed by taxpayer dollars. Cortopassi's initiative would also require a statewide public vote for $2-billion-plus government projects funded by revenue bonds. Such bonds are funded through tolls and fees. These typically are used for bridge and toll-road projects and – no surprise here – for the tunnel project Cortopassi opposes.
Cortopassi has been funding political messages about the state's budget situation in newspapers across the state (including the Union-Tribune), so it seems likely he has the funds to champion his measure, which already has qualified for the November ballot. This will be a bigger problem for the tunnels than the Eggman/Wolk measure given the latter has little chance of getting through the Legislature and no chance of getting the governor's approval.
Recent polls give aid and comfort to opponents of the rail and tunnel projects. According to a poll late last year by the Stanford University-based Hoover Institution, 53 percent of likely state voters would support that Huff/Runner measure to redirect rail funding, while only 31 percent would oppose it. The tunnel project was a close call, with roughly a third of voters in support, opposition and undecided. The poll also found voters opposed by a two-to-one margin one possibility for raising transportation taxes—a tax on miles driven.
There's no doubt the governor has an uphill battle in funding his infrastructure priorities. Virtually every political interest group in California—business leaders, unions, Republicans, Democrats—agrees on the need for increased infrastructure spending. But the devil—or at least the ideology and politics—always is in the details. It's probably time for the governor to make a more persuasive case for his priorities.
The post Is California Infrastructure About Taxes or Priorities? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For those who nurture an ideology that has never achieved significant electoral power in the United States, it can become all too easy to believe that only shadowy cabals and/or single-structure impediments are blocking reforms that would otherwise be broadly popular. If only we got rid of X, goes the belief, Policytopia would be within our grasp.
But enough about libertarians. (I kid, I kid.) Bernie Sanders, the Democratic socialist, is the latest iteration of a recurring political character over the last quarter century—the progressive stalwart from "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" who believes that progressive policies are being held back not by a more centrist public, but by a corrupt campaign finance system. Like Jerry Brown in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000, Sanders appears to sincerely believe that a political revolution lies on the other side of eliminating superPACs.
"We've heard a lot of great ideas here tonight," Sanders said, with contestable accuracy, at the end of the last Democratic presidential debate. "Let's be honest and let's be truthful. Very little is going to be done to transform our economy and to create the kind of middle class we need unless we end a corrupt campaign finance system which is undermining American democracy." The solution? "We've got to get rid of superPACs, we've got to get rid of Citizens United, and what we've got to do is create a political revolution which revitalizes American democracy." That's all.
Sanders' opening statement at the debate bemoaned "a corrupt campaign finance system where millionaires and billionaires are spending extraordinary amounts of money to buy elections." His first answer promised "a government that works for all of us, and not just big campaign contributors." Asked about the questionable political viability of national single-payer health care, in a country where Obamacare has almost never polled north of 50 percent, he said this:
Do you know why we can't do what every other country, major country, on Earth is doing? It's because we have a campaign finance system that is corrupt, we have superPACs, we have the pharmaceutical industry pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign contributions and lobbying, and the private insurance companies as well.
Detecting a theme?
There were no questions at the debate that couldn't be steered back to campaign finance reform; no left-of-Obama policies that couldn't be depicted as popular among the public. Asked how he might bring a polarized polity together, Sanders responded:
The real issue is that Congress is owned by big money and refuses to do what the American people want them to do. The real issue is that in area after area, raising the minimum wage to $15 bucks an hour, the American people want it. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, creating 13 million jobs, the American people want it. The pay equity for women, the American people want it. Demanding that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes. The American people want it. […] The point is, we have to make Congress respond to the needs of the people, not big money.
Do the American people really want these policies? Not exactly. Taxing the rich is certainly always popular as a general proposition. But on "pay equity," a HuffPost/YouGov poll in 2014 found just 32 percent favored legislation to fix the male/female pay gap, compared to 37 percent who considered the current laws to be "about right." Everybody wants to "rebuild our crumbling infrastructure," but when you start asking specific trade-off questions, like the Reason-Rupe poll did in 2014, you'll see that, sure, 46 percent of Americans want more transportation-infrastructure spending, but 73 percent say the federal government spends existing funds inefficiently, 85 percent are opposed to raising the gas tax (which funds most road infrastructure), and 58 percent preferred tolls over more gas taxes. A Sanders policy mandate that does not make.
What about a $15 minimum wage? This idea is overwhelmingly popular in expensive liberal cities like New York, but there isn't a lot of national polling data on mandating #NewYorkValues (or L.A. values, Seattle values, or even Long Beach values!) on the federal level. A Hart Research Group poll from last year found 63 percent support for a $15 federal minimum wage by 2020, but we could stand to see more Gallups and Pews weigh in on the specifics. Even making big-city minimum wages mandatory on the state level has run into opposition from bona fide blue governors like Jerry Brown (about which more below), for reasons that almost certainly have more to do with economics than campaign contributions.
Watching Bernie Sanders repeatedly hack the debate conversation back to how campaign finance was single-handedly blocking the broadly popular progressive agenda gave me a powerful feeling of déjà vu. Sixteen years ago I watched another indefatigable old northeastern progressive make the same case in the same way, day after anti-"corporation" day. Like 2016 Sanders, Ralph Nader in 2000 caught fire with a progressive left disillusioned with the coronation of an unlovable establishmentarian (Al Gore was nobody's leftist back then), drawing some of the biggest crowds of any candidate that year. (It has largely gone down the memory hole, but Nader filled Madison Square Garden and dozens of arenas around the country to paying audiences.)
Nader was fond of saying, then as well as now, that "Most of our stands and positions are supported by most Americans." As I once uncharitably observed,
Most Americans, it seems safe to wager, are not in favor of abolishing the death penalty, doubling the minimum wage, taxing every stock transaction, beefing up the Internal Revenue Service, reorienting the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "fight global infectious diseases," charging broadcast companies "billions" in spectrum "rent," rewriting the Constitution to create European-style proportional representation, and erecting a Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut. Yet Nader seems to believe that if we just remove the corporate blinders from our eyes, Americans will naturally embrace this political program and the Greens will become a "majoritarian" party.
The Naderite/Bernist faith in the popularity of their ideas is part of their unlikely charm (one shared in similar fashion, if not ideology, by Ron Paul). They come off as incorruptible, genuine and principled, all rare and attractive traits in politicians. But charming delusions are still delusional, and Sanders fans who are convincing themselves about the majoritarian appeal of Bernie's policies (even the ones I agree with!) will surely be in for quite a shocker if that rubber meets the road in federal policymaking. Indeed, there's an argument to be made that the Democrats' historic political decimation in statehouses and Congress has come at least partly as a result of the party shifting over the past decade from Bill Clinton-style economics to a more Sanders/Elizabeth Warren-friendly critique.
When you see the Nader/Sanders similarities, it's tempting to make sweeping conclusions about a Democratic fringe now becoming mainstream. But this trend is actually nothing new. Want to see the most Bernie-like speech you'll encounter this week? Take a look at the 1992 Democratic National Convention address by Bill Clinton runner-up Jerry Brown, in which the former Governor Moonbeam thunders for the minimum wage, warns of a society "breaking down" over income inequality, calls for the elimination of superPACs, and warns that "there is no such thing as a billion-dollar populist." Some excerpts:
Instead of government by the people and for the people and of the people, President Bush and his allies give us government of, by and for the privileged…. [They are presiding over] the growing concentration of wealth beyond any boundary of nation or conscience and its influence over our governing institutions through money.
Whatever nice programs we speak of, whatever dreams we share, unless the basic fact of unchecked power and privilege is acknowledged and courageously challenged, nothing will ever change. […]
Except for the influence of power and money, how can we explain why high price corporate lunches are tax deductible but not the hard-earned tuition payments of struggling students? You tell me 'cause you know the answer. It's money, it's contacts, it's everything that's wrong with this country. […]
Let's put it simply. The words of politics will remain empty forever unless we challenge and challenge honestly and directly and in a measurable and credible way the corrupt money and the influence that today powers our campaigns and puts our words and faces across TV screens in five and ten and $20 million campaigns. We got to get at that root or we're never going to build the trees of progress.
The disintermediation of political gatekeepers, which Nick Gillespie and I talk about at length in The Declaration of Independents: How libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with America, means that political parties can no longer just wave aside the deeply felt beliefs of their own grassroots. On the Republican side, at least until recently, that meant a resurgence of fiscal conservatism among a new bloc of politicians and their supporters. The Democrats could have chosen any number of issues to challenge their own establishment with; unfortunately (from a libertarian perspective, anyway) they chose Democratic-socialist economics.
Will those policies prove to be majoritarian, as Bernie Sanders and many of his supporters believe? I'll take the under.
The post The Bernie Sanders Delusion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown released his budget plan for the next fiscal year yesterday. It would increase general fund spending by 5.6 percent, an increase of about $6 billion, to $122.6 billion. Brown is also putting $2 billion more than required in the state's "rainy day fund," to get it up to $8 billion. There's more spending on colleges, increased per-pupil spending for public schools, and new sources of revenue (as in, more taxes and fees).
Remarkably, people are complaining that Brown is not spending even more money. There are pots that have not yet been delivered chickens. From the Associated Press:
Democratic legislative leaders complained that Brown did not spend enough on early childcare programs, did not expand grants to families on welfare, didn't devote more money to affordable housing and appeared resistant to further increases to the minimum wage.
"California has turned the corner. But not every Californian is feeling it," said Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. She said there remains "a laundry list of critical needs."
Yeah, about that minimum wage: California's minimum wage jumped to $10 at the start of the year. Union activists are pushing for a $15 minimum wage through a ballot initiative. So what happened is that the governor's office, while preparing the budget, has to deal with cost consequences of the increase, and in the introduction to the new budget, Brown actually details what's happening now and what would happen if California recklessly jumps to a $15 minimum wage:
In 2013, the Governor signed legislation to raise the state minimum wage by 25 percent, from $8 an hour to $10 an hour in two steps. The second increase to $10 an hour just went into effect on January 1, 2016. On an inflation-adjusted basis, the new level is the highest minimum wage in California since 1979. The higher minimum wage will raise the income of an estimated 2.2 million workers. However, higher minimum wage laws are not free. They raise the operating costs of many businesses, and the state must shoulder higher wages in its programs, particularly In-Home Supportive Services and developmental services. For example, the increase to $10 an hour has raised General Fund costs by over $250 million annually.
Already there are proposals to raise the minimum wage further. At $15 an hour, as two ballot measures propose, the General Fund would face major increased costs, estimated at more than $4 billion annually by 2021. Based on current projections, such a change would return the state to annual budget deficits—even assuming a continued economic expansion. Yet under the measures, one or more increases would likely occur at the same time that California is experiencing a recession. Such an increase would require deeper cuts to the budget and exacerbate the recession by raising business costs, resulting in more lost jobs.
Indeed, previous minimum wage increases for the state landed at the starts of 2007 and 2008, right in the heart of our financial crisis and recession, which hit California particularly hard.
While it's great that California's current governor has some common sense over minimum wage hikes, Lt. Gov Gavin Newsom, who will be running to succeed Brown, has endorsed one of the $15 an hour mandates.
But for those who think Brown might be getting a little bit too sensible, don't worry: The Cap and Trade Fund expenditure plan still includes $500 million for the boondoggle of a high-speed rail project, Brown's ugly baby that just won't die. That covers less than one percent of the estimated $68 billion project (though realistically it will cost much, much more). I suppose we should be glad there isn't even more money in the budget for it.
The post Even in California's Progressive Paradise, Gov. Brown Understands Dangers of Minimum Wage Hikes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is one of the more interesting politicians to cover given his forthrightness. Agree or disagree with what he says—the world has "gone over the edge" because of global warming, for instance—but there's little doubt he says what's on his mind. Brown's press conferences evoke laughter because of his "no BS" words and weird historical references.
He's not your typical elected official, which is what's so off-putting about his clod-footed handling of a recent scandal involving the use of state resources regarding his 2,700-acre family ranch near Williams. The administration's reaction to an Associated Press report is what one one would expect from any politician caught in a snare. The excuses are literally unbelievable. The usually loquacious Brown didn't have anything to say.
Last week, AP reported Brown "last year directed state oil and gas regulators to research, map and report back on any mining and oil drilling history and 'potential for future oil and gas activity' at the Brown family's private land in Northern California". At Brown's request, regulators produced a 51-page report over two days, even though elected officials are not allowed to use public resources for personal reasons.
The state's oil and gas agency called this a proper and legal use of state resources. Administration officials said the governor got no better service than any member of the public might get, and they provided three examples of similar research provided to others.
As AP noted, two of the examples were not for private individuals. One was for the city of Los Angeles, which wields a good bit of clout. Another was for an environmental organization. One was a much shorter request provided to an individual, whose name was redacted. The administration also argued that these are just public records that anyone can compile, although it's unlikely any ordinary person would know how to do this.
AP interviewed industry and past agency officials who said members of the public might get a little help but never anything this extensive or this quick. Even a prominent columnist who defends the governor found that explanation far-fetched. "I'd be seriously shocked if this had gone down as the Brown administration implies: That the governor received no better treatment from his minions than any ordinary citizen would," wrote the Los Angeles Times' George Skelton.
The ongoing news has gotten worse for the governor. "A worker in the state oil and gas regulatory agency lodged a whistleblower's complaint over being ordered to prepare a state map of the oil and gas potential, history and geology of … Brown's family ranch, the worker and her attorney said," according to another AP report. Furthermore, the article interviewed one former official who said state workers "described Brown as being irate" because a supervisor sent him information via email—and such info could be accessed through open-records laws.
Some conservatives have jumped on the matter. Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, told the Breitbart news service, "The governor's actions appear to be a clear violation of well-known state law prohibiting the use of public resources for personal gain." Grove called for an investigation and possible prosecution and fine.
Some critics have viewed the scandal through the lens of hypocrisy. The governor's climate-change agenda calls for the dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, although in fairness the governor has been favorable toward fracking and oil-and-gas exploration in the short term. The report found no potential there, so it will remain unclear what he intended to do with the information.
The most entertaining response came from the mischief-makers at Capitol Watchdog, which set up a Web site that lets people ask the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources to provide the same service for their property. More than 200 people have sent requests, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which quotes a department official saying it will indeed provide a no-cost map to those who request it. So the administration is doubling-down on its original explanation.
Maybe as the four-term governor becomes nostalgic about his role in California history, he failed to make the proper distinctions between his public and personal lives. Or maybe it's because of arrogance.
"This isn't much of a scandal in the grand scheme of things, but it is definitely an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds and an abuse of officeholder authority," said Dan Schnur, a former GOP political consultant and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "What's most striking, though, is the lack of any acknowledgement of inappropriate behavior or apology from the governor."
Schnur believes this is the result of California being a one-party state: "It's a mark of the absence of a legitimate two-party system in Sacramento and the out-sized power of the governor that there has been so little pushback from the Legislature. The result is that there's no real pressure on the governor's office to admit any wrongdoing."
Indeed. Clearly, Brown should have known better. And the governor certainly should have dealt with it in a more characteristic and forthright way. Luckily, there's still time for Brown to return to form with a no-BS apology.
The post Jerry Brown's Arrogant Response to Oil Scandal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Our story thus far: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is famous for its plodding, slow-moving, and life-destroying bureaucracy.
More than a dozen states have passed "right to try" legislation, which allows terminally ill patients access to drugs that have passed some but not all levels of FDA approval. The idea is that such people literally have nothing left to lose and much to gain. And their gain may well be society's too.
California's legislature recently passed right to try. When it got to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown, he vetoed it:
In a veto message, Brown said "patients with life threatening conditions should be able to try experimental drugs" but that proposed changes to federal policies will streamline access to such drugs.
"Before authorizing an alternative state pathway," he wrote, "we should give this federal expedited process a chance to work."
As conservative bioethics writer Wesley J. Smith notes at National Review, "This makes no sense."
Would that Brown could have sat down to talk with David Huntley, who died earlier this year from Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS). In this recent Reason video, Huntley, with the help of a vocoder since the disease had robbed him of the ability to talk normally, makes a heart-breaking and perfectly rational argument in favor of right-to-try legislation. Brown's sleep should be haunted by Huntley's plea.
For more on Huntley and right to try, go here.
The post Jerry Brown, Humanitarian, Vetoes "Right to Try" Legislation That Might Help Terminally Ill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On governance and budget matters, Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) has earned a reputation for being reasonable and moderate (by California standards). Even many Republicans describe him as the "last adult" in the Capitol, given his refusal to embrace far-reaching programs. Yet when it comes to global warming, the governor is anything but measured these days.
"God is not mocked…," Brown said (based on his published text), quoting St. Paul's letter to the Galatians, during his talk this week to a Vatican symposium on climate change. "And what St. Paul said in reference to God, we can also say about God's creation. We have heard what we're doing to that creation, what a trillion tons of CO2 and greenhouse gases will do. And that text that God is not mocked is not susceptible to compromises, to regrets. It's inexorable, it's absolutes."
He also stepped up the ad hominem on his climate-policy critics — accusing them of spending millions of dollars promoting propaganda and of "falsifying the scientific record" (even though some scientists who promote global warming also have been accused of manipulating data.)
Brown used words more reminiscent of Old Testament warnings than New Testament apologetics: The Earth may have already gone past the "tipping point" where the climate is changing too rapidly to reverse course. Humanity may face "extinction."
I'm not trying to argue over global warming in this column. Most climatologists believe global warming is real. A minority makes persuasive alternative cases, but the political argument is over. Most Western politicians are committed to combating it. Polls show most Californians are supportive of Brown's policies provided they don't cost them too much. That's the political reality.
But Brown's rhetoric leaves little room for debate over specifics. And the devil always is in details. When one's opponents are tools of well-financed interests or mockers of the Almighty, it's hard to have rational debate. Same goes when humanity faces extinction. I rarely trust those of any political or religious stripe who speak in fundamentalist-type absolutes.
Even if man-made global warming is an absolute truth, does that mean that, say, the governor's plan to build a $68-billion-plus bullet train is a good idea for combating climate change? Credible research suggests high speed rail will not do much to reduce global-warming-causing pollutants.
An Assembly committee recently passed SB 350, which puts into place (by 2030) Brown's goal of reducing gasoline use in automobiles by 50 percent, increasing utilities' use of renewable energy by 50 percent and increasing energy efficiency in buildings by 50 percent. The California Air Resources Board would have power to make this happen. Is it beyond debate to wonder about government accountability as a bureaucracy gains vast new powers?
Economically prosperous societies can spend more money to fight long-term climate threats than poor ones. New technologies, which sprout up in booming economies, are cleaner than old ones. So if critics call for a look at economic costs and benefits of these policies, does that make them "troglodytes," the pejorative Brown has used?
If one notes the land-use policies he champions (forcing most new development onto tiny lots, setting aside most land as open space, etc.) increases the price of real estate and therefore exacerbates California's poverty problem while (arguably) doing nothing to combat warming, that doesn't make one a propagandist. It's just another reasonable point of view.
Even Pope Francis disagrees a bit with Brown's signature anti-global-warming policy — the cap-and-trade system that imposes a cap on manufacturers' emissions and forces them to buy credits. To the pope, that system isn't radical enough, because it "may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors."
Such words reinforce a valid concern that a goal of many climate activists is to dramatically change our lifestyles. "Greenhouse gas emission reduction does not require changing people's lives," said Wendell Cox, an Illinois-based public-policy consultant who specializes in housing affordability and transportation.
That's the debate we ought to be having, but it's increasingly hard to do so in California when our usually balanced governor calls critics names and speaks in absolutes.
The post Jerry Brown, Climate Change Prophet of Doom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On governance and budget matters, Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) has earned a reputation for being reasonable and moderate (by California standards). Even many Republicans describe him as the "last adult" in the Capitol, given his refusal to embrace far-reaching programs. Yet when it comes to global warming, the governor is anything but measured these days.
"God is not mocked…," Brown said (based on his published text), quoting St. Paul's letter to the Galatians, during his talk this week to a Vatican symposium on climate change. "And what St. Paul said in reference to God, we can also say about God's creation. We have heard what we're doing to that creation, what a trillion tons of CO2 and greenhouse gases will do. And that text that God is not mocked is not susceptible to compromises, to regrets. It's inexorable, it's absolutes."
He also stepped up the ad hominem on his climate-policy critics — accusing them of spending millions of dollars promoting propaganda and of "falsifying the scientific record" (even though some scientists who promote global warming also have been accused of manipulating data.)
Brown used words more reminiscent of Old Testament warnings than New Testament apologetics: The Earth may have already gone past the "tipping point" where the climate is changing too rapidly to reverse course. Humanity may face "extinction."
I'm not trying to argue over global warming in this column. Most climatologists believe global warming is real. A minority makes persuasive alternative cases, but the political argument is over. Most Western politicians are committed to combating it. Polls show most Californians are supportive of Brown's policies provided they don't cost them too much. That's the political reality.
But Brown's rhetoric leaves little room for debate over specifics. And the devil always is in details. When one's opponents are tools of well-financed interests or mockers of the Almighty, it's hard to have rational debate. Same goes when humanity faces extinction. I rarely trust those of any political or religious stripe who speak in fundamentalist-type absolutes.
Even if man-made global warming is an absolute truth, does that mean that, say, the governor's plan to build a $68-billion-plus bullet train is a good idea for combating climate change? Credible research suggests high speed rail will not do much to reduce global-warming-causing pollutants.
An Assembly committee recently passed SB 350, which puts into place (by 2030) Brown's goal of reducing gasoline use in automobiles by 50 percent, increasing utilities' use of renewable energy by 50 percent and increasing energy efficiency in buildings by 50 percent. The California Air Resources Board would have power to make this happen. Is it beyond debate to wonder about government accountability as a bureaucracy gains vast new powers?
Economically prosperous societies can spend more money to fight long-term climate threats than poor ones. New technologies, which sprout up in booming economies, are cleaner than old ones. So if critics call for a look at economic costs and benefits of these policies, does that make them "troglodytes," the pejorative Brown has used?
If one notes the land-use policies he champions (forcing most new development onto tiny lots, setting aside most land as open space, etc.) increases the price of real estate and therefore exacerbates California's poverty problem while (arguably) doing nothing to combat warming, that doesn't make one a propagandist. It's just another reasonable point of view.
Even Pope Francis disagrees a bit with Brown's signature anti-global-warming policy — the cap-and-trade system that imposes a cap on manufacturers' emissions and forces them to buy credits. To the pope, that system isn't radical enough, because it "may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors."
Such words reinforce a valid concern that a goal of many climate activists is to dramatically change our lifestyles. "Greenhouse gas emission reduction does not require changing people's lives," said Wendell Cox, an Illinois-based public-policy consultant who specializes in housing affordability and transportation.
That's the debate we ought to be having, but it's increasingly hard to do so in California when our usually balanced governor calls critics names and speaks in absolutes.
The post Jerry Brown, Climate Change Prophet of Doom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's like a field of dreams—if you build it they will come," says Mary Jane Fagundes, a Hanford, California resident in danger of losing her home to California's high speed rail. "But it's just a dream that's never going to become a reality."
Fagundes is one of many Central Valley property owners whose land will be affected by the construction of the high speed rail. Fagundes and her husband, Jerry, first learned that the rail was coming down their street from a cousin. Though the train will run 80 feet from their front door and cause severe vibration and noise damage, the California High Speed Rail Authority will not deal with the Fagundes family because the tracks do not technically touch their property line.
"We really can't do nothing until they build the train because they're not impacting us," says Jerry Fagundes. "But talking to a lawyer we do have to get involved right now with a letter stating our impacts." The Fagundes family will have to initiate an inverse condemnation suit against the state to recoup the losses from the damage that will be caused to their property due to the construction of the high speed rail.
Since the rail was first approved by California voters in 2008, the project has been met with scrutiny from those on both the left and right for being a waste of time and money. Construction for the 800 mile train which will eventually connect San Francisco to San Diego is already way over budget—the proposed $68 billion dollar plan is now expected to cost over $100 billion—and is almost a decade behind schedule. There's also the question of funds—the state only has just over $13 billion in state and federal bonds—in addition to money diverted from California's cap-and-trade taxes—to build the train and it is unclear where the rest of the money will come from to complete construction.
"Part of the problem is that [California's governor, Democrat] Jerry [Brown] is looking for something to say, 'I did this,'" says Joel Kotkin, an urban studies professor at Chapman University. "[But] the real issue is not getting from San Francisco to LA…you're really just essentially replacing Southwest with a much more expensive system that costs lots of public money."
Despite these significant hurdles, Jerry Brown and high speed rail are moving forward and are ramping up efforts to secure the land needed for the train through the use of eminent domain.
The Fresno Bee reports that over 200 properties in the Central Valley alone have been targeted for condemnation by the state Public Works board to make way for the train and the first round of eminent domain cases are expected in courts this fall. Property owners in the first and second segments of track that span from Madera, California to Bakersfield, California are beginning to receive appraisals for their land and their have been numerous complaints about the manner in which the appraisals are being done.
Alisa Gomez, a high school teacher in Corcoran, California, is one of the property owners that has experienced problems with the appraisal process. "We got a letter stating that they wanted to appraise our property and they told us to call them when we were ready to setup an appointment. About a week later there were appraisers walking up and down the road and caught my husband at lunch time wanted to do the appraisal right then and there."
Gomez and her husband rushed home from work to do a last minute appraisal. Gomez then states rail representatives started contacting her ex-husband to get in touch with her about the property. "I don't understand why they were contacting him," says Gomez. "It's a little bit of an invasion of privacy."
After multiple attempts to remedy the situation with the rail authority, Gomez then says she came home one day to find a FedEx package thrown over her fence which contained her appraisal offer. "So I open the appraisals up and there's multiple mistakes. My name is misspelled—spelled right here—misspelled in another area. When I look through it it's kind of sad. They take properties that were foreclosed, properties that were in town instead of in the country, looked at properties that were less bedrooms, less square footage, run down and it was just it was a smack in the face offer what they had appraised us at."
"I think the rail representatives in certain instances are definitely sort of applying pressure tactics to the land owners," says Ray Carlson, a property lawyer who is representing several clients in the Hanford area. "Some of these appraisals they didn't even know were being made, they just ended up on their doorstep one day."
Gomez and Fagundes have teamed up with the Citizens for California High Speed Rail Accountability, a citizen watchdog group who's mission is to bring accountability to the high speed rail construction process.
"I think they probably started here because this is somewhere that is very simple and maybe they thought we wouldn't fight," says Gomez. "But that's definitely not the case. There's some people that really care about their property and the people around them. They do the research and they're going to make sure that they [California High Speed Rail Authority] is held accountable."
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]]>This summer, the military plans to hold a gigantic training exercise in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. It's called Jade Helm 15, and some of the people who live in those areas are pretty upset about it. There are concerns that it will disrupt people's day-to-day lives: that the troops will make too much noise, say, or that they might accidentally set off a brush fire. There are more political objections too, like the residents unhappy that they weren't able to vote on whether their towns or counties would be included in the operation. Or the man who worried to the Austin American-Statesman about what will happen when "you get the people used to the troops on the street, the appearance of uniformed troops and the militarization of the police."
Where there are anxieties, there inevitably are conspiracy theories. These have taken several forms, but the most common seems to be the one that literalizes that fear of a militarized America by declaring the operation an actual plot to install military rule. That same fellow in the American-Statesman went on to say he thought the Pentagon was "moving logistics in place for martial law." Others believe the operation will itself impose martial law, bringing the last tatters of American Constitution to an end this year.
Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded to these various constituents' concerns by asking the State Guard to monitor the operation, saying he wants "to ensure that adequate measures are in place to protect Texans." This has sparked a lot of smug commentary from the left end of the blogosphere. Charles Pierce of Esquire attributed the residents' fears to "the complete alternate reality that has been created on the American Right" and declared that "in Texas, organized paranoids are just another constituency to be serviced." Wonkette published a piece that used a lot more words to say basically the same thing. Because only a right-wing lunatic could possibly be unhappy at the thought of a military exercise being conducted next door.
Or not. Behold this transmission from the year one-nine-nine-nine:
That's a short documentary Gar Smith made about the time Operation Urban Warrior came to the San Francisco Bay. The Marine training exercise sparked sharp opposition from the local left, and at one point in the debate protesters occupied Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown's office. (Brown's support for the operation was a significant sign that he was moving away from the activist community he'd been a part of just a few years before.)
There are some obvious differences between Urban Warrior and Jade Helm. The territory affected this time is much larger than in 1999, but the number of civilians close to any given part of the operation will be much smaller. And most of Jade Helm is going to take place on private land. But the parallels are pretty strong as well. As with Jade Helm, part of the opposition stemmed from regular quality-of-life issues. (The video highlights the noise, pollution, and general disruption that the mock invasion caused.) As with Jade Helm, there was a more general concern that it was simply a bad sign culturally to have the military conducting this sort of activity in or near a civilian community. (You needn't believe such operations are intended to desensitize the public to worry that they will have that effect.) And as with Jade Helm, there were conspiracy theories—and not just from folks like Alex Jones, though yes, he was there in Oakland too. Gar Smith wrote a story for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the area's two major alt-weeklies at the time, arguing that "the armed forces are preparing themselves to contain popular uprisings—including uprisings in U.S. cities."
(Uprisings in U.S. cities? Thank goodness that could never happen.)
Feel free to look askance at the folks who think this exercise will be the actual apocalypse, as opposed to an ugly cultural signpost and a potentially noisy neighbor. Feel free to wonder at a Texas governor who issues that order but loves the idea of militarizing the Mexican border. But spare a little disdain as well for people so eager to wag their fingers at some rural Red Staters that they never wonder whether there might actually be some good reasons not to want a vast military operation in their neighborhood. If they can't quite get their minds around that concept, I know some urban Blue Staters in Oakland who could help them understand.
(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For more thoughts on conspiracy theories, go here.)
The post Friday A/V Club: I'm So Old, I Remember When Liberals Protested Military Exercises Conducted on U.S. Soil appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>They're tearing down kiddy forts in Utah and banning fast food in Idaho, but this month you'll find the most obnoxious finger wagger in California.
Gov. Jerry Brown has busted out an executive order filled with directives, possible fines, and court actions for bad boys and girls who shower too long or hose down their Hondas without consulting state and local code books.
We're in a new era," declares Brown. "The idea of your nice little green grass getting watered every day–that's going to be a thing of the past."
Brown's new era involves cracking down on those of us who use comparatively little water while continuing to give special treatment to agribusiness and other water-guzzling cronies.
In other words, Brown's "new" era is awfully similar to the old era that Brown and company have enforced for decades.
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]]>The last time we checked in with Jerry Brown, California's governor for life, he was channeling his best Zen-fascist aura, taking a break from hawking a monstrously stupid and expensive high-speed rail project, and forcing Golden State residents to ration the home use of water.
This, despite the inconvenient truth that California's highly subsidized agribultural sector uses 80 percent of the state's available water, often to grow water-intensive crops such as almonds and alfalfa. For all that, ag contributes a puny 2 percent of the state's GDP. So by all means, squeeze residential users rather than, I don't know, introduce markets, property rights, and real prices into water consumption.
But today is Earth Day, so Brown, the subject of what is to my mind one of the greatest political protest songs ever (California Uber Alles, by the Dead Kennedys), is upping End-of-Worldism that has often accompanied his rhetoric. He has now issued the following "Warning to Humanity":
Five inextricably linked areas must be addressed simultaneously:
1. We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth's systems we depend on. We must, for example, move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustible energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of our air and water. Priority must be given to the development of energy sources matched to third world needs–small scale and relatively easy to implement. We must halt deforestation, injury to and loss of agricultural land, and the loss of terrestrial and marine plant and animal species.
2. We must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively. We must give high priority to efficient use of energy, water, and other materials, including expansion of conservation and recycling.
3. We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.
4. We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty.
5. We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.
This sort of thing is pro forma on Earth Day, despite the fact that many of the causes and concerns that spurred the first Earth Day are in fact much, much better. Air quality is better everywhere in the United States than it used to be (full disclosure: that's in large part to top-down regulations that libertarians typically rail against). So is water quality. Nobody's a litter bug anymore and trash is no longer a leading cause of aural stereotypes in public-service announcements (listen to the most-famous PSA ever and tell me its soundtrack isn't offensive to contemporary ears). The only people still hopped-up about overpopulation are, apparently, Jerry Brown, anti-immigration activists, and disgruntled ex-Sierra Club supporters. As Jonathan V. Last documented in his excellent 2013 study, What to Expect When No One's Expecting, the global fertility rate was 6.0 in 1979; it's now at 2.52 and dropping so fast that 97 percent of the world's population lives in a country where fertility is declining.
As Ronald Bailey, Reason's Science Correspondent, wrote in 2010 (when Earth Day turned 40), the environmentalist thinking behind the celebration has a long history of changing its goals once they are reached. Like the neocon militarists, greens don't seem to want to declare victory and bring the troops home. Rather, they want to reinvent the goals and aims of the movement and extend their mission. Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who more or less invented Earth Day, outlined initial goals for the environmentalist movement, including cleaning the country's air and water. Once those goals were attained, notes Bailey, Nelson issued a new set of wider-ranging goals, including:
- Establish the right of every citizen to plan his family.
- Establishment of a federal environmental advocacy agency.
- Halt pollution of our seas—moratorium on Outer Continental Shelf oil drilling.
- Establish a national environmental education program encompassing pre-school through college.
- Divert money from interstate highway construction to public transportation.
- National land use planning so as to "halt the chaotic unplanned combination of urban sprawl and industrial expansion." This included a ban on strip mining and the filling of wetlands. In addition, he wanted to expand national parks and other reserves.
- Establish a national minerals and resource policy—change the mining law of 1872.
- Establish a nonpartisan national environmental political organization.
- Establish a national air and water quality policy.
Well, OK, then. All of that wouldn't just extend the mission, they would entail vast new powers to regulate and even micromanage people's lives in all sorts of ways. In a characteristically brilliant and still-prescient May 1999 piece about attempts to regulate human activity, former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel talked about how environmentalism offered a rationale for all sorts of regulation of everyday life. Free-market advocates understand externalities, she wrote, but the concept was becoming infinitely elastic in an era when networks and integrated systems were becoming the dominant metaphors about economics and global interactions.
Most of us have been willing to grant the problem of externalities in such areas as air pollution and to look for ways of addressing it with minimal disruption of market processes. But it's not that hard to declare that every market action has potentially negative spillover effects. The infinitely elastic version of the externality argument turns the language of market-oriented economics against the essential nature of commerce. Indeed, we increasingly see the externality argument aimed not at producers, the traditional target, but at consumers. My choice of which movies to watch creates cultural pollution. My purchase of convenient packaging produces environmental waste. My house color or garage facade does not please the neighbors. My purchase of consumer goods leads to "luxury fever" that hurts everyone. We are all connected in the marketplace, and therefore, in this view, our actions must be tightly regulated to contain spillovers.
Read Jerry Brown's warning and then Postrel's piece. Written in a different century, it nonetheless anticipates many of the themes Brown hammers on about and offers up a better way of thinking about progress, interconnectedness, and human action and freedom. In the same issue, she also writes about "the dangers of calling everything pollution."
And if you want a quick reminder of just how much better virtually every aspect of life is today on Spaceship Earth, take a quick peek at Ronald Bailey's review of the cutting-edge statement of environmentalist alarmism, Overdevelopment Overpopulation Overshoot. Dubbing the lushly illustrated tome "the big coffee table book of doom," Bailey writes:
On the back of the book, physicist Albert Bartlett starkly asks: "Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?" The folks at populationspeakout.org apparently think this is a devastating observation. But is it?
In his insightful 2013 book The Infinite Resource, the technologist Ramez Naam counters such thoughts with another question: "Would your life be better off if only half as many people had lived before you?" In this thought experiment, you don't get to pick which people are never born. Perhaps there would have been no Newton, Edison, or Pasteur, no Socrates, Shakespeare, or Jefferson. "Each additional idea is a gift to the future," Naam writes. "Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations." Fewer people means fewer new ideas about how to improve humanity's lot and to further decouple our endeavors from the natural world. "If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor," Naam writes, "then we should welcome every new person born as a source of betterment for our world and all of us on it."
The goal of empowering women and girls is central to making the world a better place. It is the right thing to do regardless of the effects on future population trends, though the evidence does suggest that the results will please those worried about "overpopulation." Focusing just on the increase of human numbers is a distraction and misleads the public and policymakers from what really needs to be done for humanity and the natural world to flourish. Happy Earth Day 45!
Indeed, Earth Day 45 finds the planet and its people in surprisingly good shape. Not perfect by any stretch but like Joe Namath used to say, getting better-looking every day.
More Reason on Earth Day and environmentalism.
And for god's sake—Gaia's sake?—watch this Reason TV video about "The Top 5 Environmental Disasters That DIDN'T Happen":
The post Earth Day Overload: Gov. Jerry's Brown Apocalyptic "Warning to Humanity" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reed Watson sees a silver lining in California's drought crisis. "Only such an environmental crisis changes the law," says Watson, executive director of the Property Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana. "Only when a situation gets so severe do people begin to define property rights and turn to markets to solve environmental problems."
Make no mistake: The drought in California is severe. The current shortfall in precipitation has now lasted four years. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that supplies most of California's surface water is just 5 percent of the April 1 average. As an emergency response to the drought, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered the State Water Control Board to "impose restrictions to achieve a 25 percent reduction in potable urban water usage through February 28, 2016."
Achieving such steep reductions will be a huge challenge. As it happens, the board reported in April that statewide water use fell by less than 3 percent in February, as compared to the 2013 baseline. To bring the total down more, Brown has empowered the board to "bring enforcement actions against illegal diverters and those engaging in wasteful and unreasonable use of water." Water wasters in some cities could be fined up to $500 for breaking the rules.
"Too little, too late," says Watson. "A predictable byproduct of 20 years of water mismanagement."
What about transferring water from agricultural uses to thirsty urban areas? After all, 80 percent of water in California not allocated to environmental uses goes to irrigate farms. Some rice farmers in northern California are reportedly considering selling their irrigation water to Los Angeles for $700 per acre-foot. An acre-foot—enough water to cover one acre to a depth of one foot—amounts to just under 326,000 gallons. At $700 per acre-foot, LA would be paying about two-tenths of a cent per gallon for that water.
A drought does not necessarily entail a water shortage. Droughts are caused by nature. Shortages exist when demand exceeds supply and markets are prevented from allocating a resource to its highest value use, usually because the price of the resource is held artificially low. So trades like the proposed water sales from farmers to Los Angeles can help alleviate shortages in drinking, hygienic, pool, and lawn sprinkling water.
Unfortunately, California has failed to develop institutions to handle water scarcity other than political allocation. Consequently, such trades are very hard to pull off. So what to do?
In an interview, Watson provided a preview of an upcoming PERC report titled Tapping Water Markets in California. The report's goal is to offer incremental, politically possible reforms that can be done this legislative session. (In a column last September, I discussed a more radical and longer-term water market reform based on Australia's system of water rights. Although Watson thinks it's a good idea, he believes that it would require a political miracle to get California to adopt so sweeping a scheme.)
Watson is agnostic about transferring water from farms to cities, although he does note, "I personally prefer to look on a landscape of rice paddies rather than the next marginal housing development in Los Angeles." He thinks that farmers have already made significant efforts at conservation and that there are not a lot of additional savings to be found in the agricultural sector. To my suggestion that Americans should get their vegetables from New Jersey, where Gaia regularly provides adequate rainfall, Watson observed that the growing seasons are longer in the Golden State.
Right now lots of water in California is stuck in low-value uses because the bureaucratic transactions costs to arranging water transfers are so high. PERC's plan includes a proposal to let people bank water in underground aquifers. In the current system, holders of water rights must specify to the State Water Control Board when they are going use their water, where they are going to use it, who is going to use it, and for what purpose it is going to be used. If water rights holders fail to put their supplies to a beneficial use, they run the risk of losing their rights to it. Storing water underground for later use—say, during a drought—is not considered a beneficial use by the State Water Control Board. This should be changed. "During wet years, water entrepreneurs could pump and save water and then market it later in dry times," said Watson.
Another PERC proposal is to streamline the very onerous environmental review process that strongly discourages water transfers. Watson notes that a lot of water transfers are repeat transactions, yet each one must be evaluated anew every year, even though the new transaction is the same as the already-approved old transaction.
A third change involves how water transfers are adjudicated. California has special judges who resolve disputes brought under the California Environmental Quality Act. Since would-be plaintiffs know that the judges are experienced in handling this type of litigation, this system tends to discourage frivolous and time-consuming suits. Plaintiff lawyers who want to dispute or disrupt water transfers now have the power to forum-shop, seeking friendly or inexperienced judges to hear their cases. PERC proposes to establish a similar set of water court judges to discourage such shenanigans and to speed up water trading.
PERC's longer-term vision would involve wiping the slate clean of water subsidies and encouraging every interested party to participate in water markets. Watson believes that environmentalists will eventually come to understand that they can compete in water markets too, and that they would be better able to achieve their conservation goals that way than through the political process. Some examples already exist in the state, such as the Scott River Trust in northern California, which leases water from farmers to enhance salmon spawning habitat.
"If people can't trade water, then they just keep doing the same things that they've been doing," said Watson. "The ultimate goal is to flip the switch on entrepreneurship. If unleashed, entrepreneurs will discover and develop all sorts of new technologies to use and conserve water." Perhaps the current crisis will become sufficiently severe that it forces California policy makers to contemplate the unthinkable: secure property rights and free markets.
Disclosure: I have had a long, friendly and intellectually productive relationship with PERC. I had the honor of being a Julian Simon Fellow at PERC in 2010.
The post Tapping Water Markets in California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Somehow, the architects of Obamacare in D.C. and Gov. Jerry Brown's helpers in Sacramento couldn't see this one coming: A huge increase in the number of patients served by Medic-Cal, the Golden State's version of Medicaid, coupled with no increase in the number of doctors and a decrease in reimbursement rates has led to longer and longer wait periods.
Since January 2014, reports Tracey Seipel of the Mercury News, 2.7 million new people have signed up for Medi-Cal under the expansion made possible my Obamacare.
"California did a good job of getting people signed up, but they basically stuck their heads in the sand and assumed that California physicians would just jump right on board and want to take more Medi-Cal patients," said Dr. Del Morris, president of the California Academy of Family Physicians, which represents many of the first-line doctors who treat Medi-Cal patients. "It's unacceptable to say, 'We are not ready for you yet, you'll just have to suffer with your disease.'"
Morris and other experts say the situation is about to get worse, in part because of Medi-Cal's health care reimbursement rates.
For years, the rates paid by Medi-Cal—called Medicaid in the rest of the country—have been among the nation's lowest. A provision of Obamacare hiked the rates for primary care doctors to the substantially higher Medicare rates for two years, but those increases ended on Dec. 31. A second blow came last month when the state cut the Medi-Cal reimbursement rate by another 10 percent, a reduction approved by California lawmakers in 2011 but delayed in a court battle that doctors ultimately lost.
It's worth pointing out that just because California cut reimbursement rates, it doesn't mean the state is spending less on Medi-Cal. Medicaid funding keeps going up in California (see chart). Indeed, it is either the single-biggest or second-biggest line item in every state's budget.
The article cites a study from the California Health Care Foundation that surveyed doctor availability in Medi-Cal between 2011 and 2013, before the Medi-Cal expansion. Even then, the number of primary-care doctors was below federal recommendations for Medicaid programs.
The ratio of primary care doctors participating in Medi-Cal was 35 to 49 FTEs per 100,000 enrollees, well short of the range of 60 to 80 that the federal government estimated are needed. The ratio of non-primary physicians participating in Medi-Cal was between 68 and 102 FTEs per 100,000 enrollees, a range which overlaps with the federal estimate of need (85 to 105 per 100,000).
Nope, no way you could have guessed that any problems would arise.
And then there's the 30 percent increase between 2013 and 2014 in "treat and release" visits to emergency rooms by Medi-Cal patients. Recall that getting the uninsured covered through Obamacare was supposed to reduce exactly this sort of behavior.
Seipel opens her article with the story of 49-year-old Julie Moreno, who was one of the 2.7 million folks newly covered by Medi-Cal. After waiting three months for cataract surgery and constantly being told that there were "no slots" available, Moreno ended up borrowing $14,000 for private treatment.
So she did get health care. Is that a win for Obamacare? Or a loss for everyone involved? I'm inclined to think the latter.
Hat Tip: Conn Carroll's Twitter feed.
Robert Graboyes of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has some good ideas about growing the supply of health care (not insurance or coverage, but actual goddamn health care!). He's worth listening to. Go here for more links and details.
The post California Medicaid Conundrum: What Good is Health Care If No Doctor Will See You? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As he entered the Assembly chambers to give his final inaugural address on Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown — elected to an unprecedented fourth term in November — was greeted by boisterous applause from legislators and audience members. There's little question Brown heads into his final term with a storehouse of goodwill and political capital.
Pundits who have debated how Brown will spend that capital had their questions answered. He will take two approaches — one somewhat conservative and the other more radical. The governor says he will keep the lid on government spending and long-term fiscal liabilities, while pursuing an ambitious climate-change agenda designed to slash the state's "carbon pollution" footprint and prod the rest of the world into following suit.
Given the strong Democratic tilt of the state's politics, the more conservative fiscal ideas were not as heartily received inside the chambers as the progressive part of his agenda. "My plan has been to take them on one at a time," he said, referring to California's unfunded pension and other liabilities. "For the next effort, I intend to ask our state employees to help start pre-funding our retiree health obligations, which are rising rapidly."
Climate change, fiscal future top Brown's agenda
Brown didn't ask for more state funds, but instead called on state employees to pitch in to fill the void, which evoked tepid applause. That's a potentially significant statement. "He's pressing the boundaries of what Democrats can do," said Dan Pellessier, president of California Pension Reform. "I'm hopeful the governor will now be liberated to address the unsustainable costs of retirement promises."
Pellessier touches on the big questions: Will a lame-duck Brown finally take on public-sector unions and propose deep and difficult reforms to deal with those unsustainable promises? Or will he place his real time and energy into expanding the state's environmental regulations? The answers will determine his legacy.
"I believe I know Jerry well and that he worries about and works toward a legacy more than almost any other politician," said Art Laffer, the Reagan-administration economist and father of supply side economics. "Like the sly old crocodile on the banks of the Zambesi River, he's waiting for his chance to move." Laffer expects a fiscal "game changer."
Brown certainly is pushing a game changer on the environmental front. Referring to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he proposed these objectives for the next 15 years: increasing the proportion of the state's renewable energy use to 50 percent from round 30 percent, slashing car and truck petroleum use in half, and doubling the efficiency of the state's buildings. This is "a very tall order," Brown admitted.
It's an expensive one, too. The governor will be in Fresno on Tuesday to break ground for the $68-billion high-speed-rail line designed to help combat climate change. The only thing that will break, said Assemblyman Jim Patterson R-Fresno, is the bank. Brown may be holding the line on general-fund spending, but his conservative critics say his rail and Delta plans will ratchet up long-term debt spending.
It's not clear how Brown will square that circle, although contradiction is nothing new for him.
In 1978 voters had approved Proposition 13, which put a cap on property taxes. The governor was a foe of the initiative, but so earnestly implemented it that he eventually won the praise of the proposition's co-author, Howard Jarvis. In his second inaugural in January 1979, Brown praised the tax revolt as a legitimate reaction by an angry citizenry, and warned against "false prophets" who "advocate more and more government spending as the cure."
So it's not surprising that Brown has focused part of his agenda on reining in government's long-term debts, just as it's not surprising that Brown still sees environmental peril — "the growing assault on the very systems of nature on which human beings and other forms of life depend," as he put it in his Monday speech — as a core part of his mission. He has long been comfortable advancing both themes.
During his speech, Brown said the issues his father Pat Brown raised during his inaugural 56 years ago "bear eerie resemblance to those we still grapple with today." The general themes of politics — taxes, the size of government, crime and infrastructure — share similarities going back to ancient times. But this is a different California today than it was during Brown's first term.
Whereas voters in the 1970s voted to slash their taxes, voters in 2012 raised them. In Brown's early terms, crime (and the fear of it) was soaring and his anti-death-penalty Supreme Court appointees ultimately became touchstones in an angry recall campaign centered on the crime issue.
With violent crime at near-historic lows these days, Brown touted "less expensive, more compassionate and more effective ways to deal with crime" — an issue that has increasingly gained traction across the political spectrum.
"He has held the line against more ambitious spending from the Democrats in the Legislature, which allows him to balance a rightward lean on budget matters with a more liberal approach to environmental and public safety issues," said Dan Schnur, a University of Southern California professor and former Republican political consultant.
This is classic Jerry Brown and his overly discussed "Canoe Theory of Politics" (paddle a little to the left, and then a little to the right). Brown is a man who wants to "forge a bold new future grounded in the past" but who won't drive the state "off a cliff," added his wife, Anne Gust Brown, while introducing him to the Assembly.
That's no doubt true. But if he puts the aggressive environmental goals above the more-conservative fiscal ones, he could drive the state a little too close to the precipice.\
The post Jerry Brown's Legacy Depends on Focus He Doesn't Have Yet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In defiance of all sense and reason, California is actually pushing forward with its absurd bullet train plan. Today is the groundbreaking for the first stretch of the estimated (completely underestimated, probably) $68 billion train. It's supposed to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles someday, far in the future. For now, though, they're just building the start of a stretch from Fresno to Madera, in the middle of nowhere where nobody needs it, nor will anybody probably ever need it.
And that may well be it unless more money appears somehow. The state only has $12 billion on hand for the project and is planning for another $8 billion. The rest is absolutely nowhere to be found. California got $3 billion from the Obama administration as part of the stimulus package, but it's pretty safe to say they're not going to see another cent from the federal government for at least the next two years. There is no sign of any private investment coming. The California High Speed Rail Authority is taking the "If you build it, they will come" mantra as a permanent motto. Its chairman, Dan Richard, is hoping they can raise money from selling advertisement and real estate development rights along the route or that the feds will chip in again later.
By the way, they actually still don't even have all the land they need yet for just this first stretch. Here's how screwed up this whole project is, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times;
The two-year delay in the start of construction has been caused in large part by the slow pace of land acquisitions. Even as construction gets underway, the state has only acquired 101 of the needed 526 parcels for the first 29 miles. Critics say few of those parcels are contiguous, though the rail authority has so far not disclosed those details.
Experts in the construction industry say the project's delayed start means it will need to proceed at an exceptional pace to comply with a federal funding requirement that $2 billion in grants from Washington and $2 billion in state matching funds be spent by Oct. 1, 2017.
Some of that money has already been used, but the requirement means that over the next 1,000 days the state will have to spend at a rate of $3 million to $4 million every calendar day — as high or higher than any transportation project in history.
Well, I will say that I am pretty confident in California's ability to break new records in spending money very quickly.
Reason has been treating this awful project as a whipping boy for years. Check out our archive of high-speed rail-related pipe-dream-puncturing here.
And here's some Reason TV videos to help explain the awfulness of the project. First up, Reason Foundation VP of Research Adrian Moore sits down with transportation expert Wendell Cox to discuss the problems with the project:
Second, I sat down with Eric Christen, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction to discuss his group's attempt to battle the union cronyism of the train project:
The post California to Begin Digging Giant Ditch to Dump In Billions of Dollars appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Wilson and his team were inspired by a proposed law that passed the California House and Senate but which Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed yesterday. The law, known as the "ghost gun" bill, would have banned guns without serial numbers filed with the government of any sort, as well as forcing those who do make homemade weapons to go through new procedures and background checks and getting federal Department of Justice approval before doing so.
Essentially, the bill would ban making a gun that the state didn't know about and mark. (Nick Gillespie blogged about the ghost gun bill here last month.)
The LA Times reported Brown's surprisingly sensible statement on vetoing the bill, pushed forward by Democratic state Rep. Kevin de Leon: "I appreciate the author's concerns about gun violence, but I can't see how adding a serial number to a homemade gun would significantly advance public safety." Exactly right, Gov. Brown.
To show exactly how right Brown was, and to educate any other state legislature that might contemplate following in de Leon's footsteps, Wilson and his Defense Distributed team launched a website today called GhostGunner.net.
Through it they are selling a tabletop milling machine which can, quoting from their FAQ, "manufacture any mil-spec 80% AR-15 lower receiver that already has the rear take down well milled out. ….Lowers with non-mil-spec trigger guards that are otherwise mil-spec are also compatible. Defense Distributed recommends using the 7075 Ares Armor Raw 80% Lower AR-15 Billet."
Wilson launched the project in response to de Leon's bill, to "the rhetoric developed out of California of detectability as the norm, of the observability of everything to the modern state. This guy de Leon defined as a 'ghost' something not intelligible to the state and that's a perfect way of talking about it. So this device will cut aluminum and it's good at finishing an 80 percent lower receiver for an AR-15 in under an hour." (Roughly, the ATF declares any lower receiver that is more than 80 percent complete as an actual gun subject to all regulations on actual guns.)
Wilson waited to see what Brown would do with the bill before publicly launching; he's convinced that had they gone live this time yesterday that Brown's office might have been scared into signing the ghost gun bill that Brown instead vetoed.
Wilson has always, as detailed in my 2013 profile, seen his actions as a complicated dance of reactions to what his controlling opponents do, and he generally understands what they will then do in reaction to him. "We decided we have to give them that world they are worried about with [de Leon's ghost gun bill], to create the problem they are talking about, to give that problem to them," Wilson says.
Laws like de Leon's, Wilson thinks, offer a "preferred regulatory landscape that's predicated on all the things that the digital manufacturing revolution" has made easier by an order of magnitude, not being as easy to get around as they actually are. Wilson just wants to remind controllers they don't live in the world they think they live in, a world where a mere law will actually stop something they perceive as a problem: someone possessing a tool of self-defense that is not visible and regulatable by the state.
The Ghost Gunner website FAQ has further technical details on how the tabletop device works, and this comment on the current legality of using it:
Semi-automatic firearms, including the AR-15 lower receivers, are generally legal to manufacture for private individuals per US federal law Title 18 do not require serialization or other maker's marks. However, some states/municipalities restrict either the manufacture of certain firearms, or, more recently, the personal manufacture of a firearm with a 3D printer and/or CNC machine. DD makes no claim regarding local manufacturing legality; lower receiver files provided by Defense Distributed might require special licensing to manufacture and/or possess.
Under federal law, manufacturing a firearm for contemplation of future sale without an FFL is prohibited. Without a manufacturing FFL, you should manufacture firearms for personal use only. There are methods to legally transfer ownership of personally manufactured firearms, but they do not apply when the original manufacturing intent is to build a firearm for commercial or non-personal use. Recent ATF determinations have signaled that allowing others use of your CNC equipment may itself constitute manufacturing, therefore Defense Distributed advises GhostGunner owners to neither print firearms for other individuals, nor allow other individuals to use their GhostGunner to manufacture firearms.
You can pre-order the device for $1199 now (the earlier $999 price already sold out), and they promise holiday delivery.
Andy Greenberg at Wired wrote about it this morning. Excerpt that nicely sums up why making a homemade "lower receiver" for a rifle is such a big deal:
A lower receiver is the body of the gun that connects its stock, barrel, magazine and other parts. As such, it's also the rifle's most regulated element. Mill your own lower receiver at home, however, and you can order the rest of the parts from online gun shops, creating a semi-automatic weapon with no serial number, obtained with no background check, no waiting period or other regulatory hurdles.
Greenberg also quotes Wilson explaining why he's moved from plastic 3D weapons to metal milled ones in his latest project:
[Wilson's] switch from 3-D printing to CNC milling metal makes the ubiquitous creation of usable, lethal weapons one step more practical . "3-D printing [guns] was about signaling the future. This is about the present," he says. "You can use this machine today to create something to the standards you're used to…The gold standard of the gun community is metal."
The promotional video for the project, in classic Wilson style, uses only the words of Rep. de Leon and an ATF agent and the music of Satie, and features the look of an arty horror flick to both scare the squares and hep the aware to the fact that no matter what the state thinks it can do to stop you from owning guns, ingenuity and technology and indomitable will can get around their efforts. (Favorite touches: the glowing pig mask over a light fixture, and the mixture of a shadowy figure reading in a dark room with the Ghost Gunner and a gun on a table):
The post 'Ghost Gunner' from Cody Wilson Allows Home Milling Lower Receivers for Rifles for Just Over a Thousand Bucks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Brown, in his veto message, said that although there may be some circumstances when a warrant is appropriate, the bill went too far.
The post Jerry Brown Vetoes Bill to Limit Police Drones in California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Guns.com reports that a new, highly restrictive piece of legislation, SB808, awaits only Gov. Jerry Brown's signature before becoming law in California:
The bill, championed famously by state Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, in a January news conference in which he extolled the characteristics of "30 magazine clips" and "ghost guns," aims to largely outlaw 3D printed guns and place restrictions on guns made by home based builders. Introduced just eight months ago, the bill passed the state Senate on Aug. 29 by a 21-12 vote and navigated through the State Assembly by a closer 46-30 margin.
"Technological advancements require that we update our laws to meet new and growing public safety concerns to make sure dangerous individuals cannot manipulate technologies at the expense of public safety," said de Leon in a release last week.
Yeah, it probably will work almost as well as current gun laws do at keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals.
The law will require
a state Department of Justice Bureau of Firearms background check and authorization before assembling a firearm in the home of a state resident. Additionally, before this could be granted, the candidate would have to show proof that building the gun would not violate local city or county codes.
It would further require those who in the state that have already made their own gun after December of 1968 to obtain and engrave or affix a DOJ-issued serial number and prohibit the sale, transfer or inheritance of these guns.
In a final step, all guns made by unlicensed homebuilders would have to be serialized, have that serial number logged by the DOJ, and kept on record. Furthermore, homebuilders would have to pay a fee.
Noncompliance could result in up to a $1,000 fine and/or a year in prison.
Hat Tip: Declan McCullagh's Twitter feed.
Watch Reason TV's interview with Cody Wilson, 3D-gun evangelist and provocateur deluxe:
Read more about Wilson and Defense Distributed here.
The post California "Ghost Gun" Bill Would Effectively Ban 3D-Printed Guns, Homemade Weapons appeared first on Reason.com.
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